Tarnished
by Havoc
Summary: AU: set past season seven, Buffy tries to decide between Angel and Spike. Finally done!
1. Insomnia

_Well, if you ever come back_

_For Jane or for me_

_Well, your enemy is sleeping_

_And you're woman is free..._

_Famous Blue Raincoat- Leonard Cohen_

She should be sleeping. He was, and hell, he was nocturnal. Something was wrong with her, something deep, and she couldn't even put a name to it. But no, here she was, no demons to destroy, no vampires to slay, and she was still awake, staring into the night as the minutes on the clock ticked closer and closer to the time the clock was set up for.

Life ought to be perfect. She had everything she ever thought she wanted, and she still felt empty, lost. This was supposed to be happy ever after time and instead she just dragged through each day, feeling like death. She had died so many times. When did the reward come?

Buffy sighed, gave up on sleep, and pulled herself up to her knees, head cradled in her arms. Screw this, she muttered. She thought she meant to be quiet, but as soon as the vampire next to her stirred, she realized the truth was she just hadn't cared enough. Great, she thought to herself as his eyes opened, his vision better in the dark than it ever was in the light, another moment to chalk up in the what's wrong with Buffy? column.

"I'm sorry, baby," she said, trying to master false sincerity. "I didn't mean to wake you."

He sat up too, wrapped cold arms around her, rested his head against her shoulder. "What's wrong, Buff? Can't you sleep?"

"Must be insomnia. Been trying all night."

He rubbed her back gently, the cool easing through the t-shirt she wore to sleep, and his voice was suggestive as he whispered, "I could try to relax you..."

She pulled away, annoyed. "No! I mean, not now. I just can't sleep. I just... can't sleep."

He pulled back, concerned. "Sorry, didn't mean to push."

She knew he still remembered the way she was when she was younger, the way she always needed him. She had grown up since then, changed since then. She had been the oldest slayer that had ever lived for years now, and the weight of it on her seemed to suck her down more and more each year.

She jammed a hand into her freshly cut hair, feeling the short ends tickle her palm. Yet another attempt to try and feel new, different. Yet another failure. "I just gotta go. I'm gonna take a walk or something."

"Want company?" He hated leaving her alone, hated any time that he wasn't with her. But she shook her head. He loved her too much. He wanted to give her things she didn't even need.

"No, I'm just gonna, I'll be back. You rest."

Buffy pulled herself out of the bed, dressed in whatever she could find in the dark. As she was walking out the door, he called out, "I love you, Buffy," in the same sweet and gentle voice he had always used.

Her answer was mechanical as she responded. "I love you, too, Angel. Get some sleep."

And then she was down the hall, past the bedrooms where Conner and Dawn slept, down the stairs, and out the door, out where she could be free.

The night air was cool and crisp, sharp with the first edges of fall. This time of year always tasted like slow death to her, the coming of the darkness. She had hated it ever since Willow dragged her out of heaven. September rolled around and all she felt every year was just another year older. All the things people were supposed to collect in their life, to have and to cherish, were hers, and yet none of them felt real. There were the two children, neither hers, and there was the man, her childhood lover, her _soul-mate_, and she couldn't even understand why she was with him.

She sighed again, drew the chill into her lungs, tried not to think of dying.

The darkness stirred, walked closer. Her night vision had never been anything to sneer at either, and besides, she recoginized that walk. When he spoke, it was almost anti-climatic. "Hullo, pet. Miss me?"


	2. Excuses

Buffy could feel her face harden at that familiar voice. Two years. Two years he had been gone, and he had the nerve to sound like it had been just days. Bastard. It was a fight to keep the anger out of her voice when she spoke, but she was older now and getting better at controlling herself. In fact, she took some pride in the fact that her voice sounded almost light as she responded. "There was something to miss, Spike?"

"Hey, give a vamp a break. Had to get my head on straight. " He still spoke with that same cocky confidence that marked everything he did. Head on straight, her ass. It was clear that nothing that really matter had changed.

Against her will, she could feel herself being drawn closer to him. He had always had that kind of an effect on her, had always been her magnet, no matter how much she hated or loved him. She ought to kill him. She should have dusted his sorry ass years ago. Asses to ashes, she thought to herself, and tried not to laugh aloud.

"What was to get straight?" she shot back at him. "You may be thinking that I have amnesia or some sort of horrible brain disease that makes me stupid, but I remember the last time you came back. I can remember it like it was yesterday. You came back, looking like death warmed over, mutter something about having a soul and collapse at my feet. You came back to me. And I , I, like an idiot, tend to you, comfort you in your need, and finally collapse from exhaustion from the sheer hell of taking care of such a whiney bastard, and when I wake up, where are you? What, I couldn't hear you? Let me remind you of where you were. Not in my bed! Not in my home and not, for that matter, in my town! Possibly not even in my country!"

The anger left her abruptly, gone so fast she felt deflated. She stopped where she stood, still taking in the new and improved Spike. "God damn it, you didn't even leave a note."

His jaw worked as he listened to her rant. In the old days, they would have been at each other's throats by this time. Hell, in some of the old days, they would have been on the ground by now, learning a whole different way to fight.

Bastard still looked good, too. That just made it worse. It was the hair that changed him the most, she thought. Gone was the trademark platinum shell, the hair she used to work so hard to mess up. It was longer now, the roots a pure and shining black; only the tips were still pale blond. The new look made his eyes bluer and his face, if anything, sharper. Or maybe he had just been refusing to eat- God knows he had started some strange hobbies and habits after the spell that gave him back his soul. The living death of starvation would have suited the old Spike just fine. He still wore black, though, and if anything, it was even more decadent. Leather pants hugged his hips and thighs, and a black velvet shirt lay mostly open on his chest, baring skin as pale as stars. She thought she could see the heavy black lines of some kind of tattoo just trailing down his shoulder, but shirt hid her view of it. A heavy silver chain was tight against his neck. Elegant punk, more goth than hard core.

He was staring at her now too, no doubt taking in her changes just as she studied his. She, on the other hand, already knew she looked like crap. The clothes she had thrown on turned out to be a pair of jeans that she had probably had since high school. The t-shirt was the same old crappy one she wore to bed, some awful thing the school had given Dawn for getting perfect attendance. Buffy had hung on it out of some strange sense of pride, and Dawn had been more than happy to give it up. What teenager in her right mind actually wanted to wear a shirt that said perfect attendance anywhere? It was like wearing a shirt that said "kick me, I'm a geek." To add to it, Buffy was suddenly feeling strangely naked without her hair. When she had first cut it down to the choppy two or three inches it was now, it felt like liberation. But with Spike's eyes on her so fixedly, all it felt like now was strange. Suddenly and without warning, she got a memory flash of the two of them standing by the sink, Spike reaching out to the touch her hair, saying how much he loved it. She had cut it short for the first time that very day.

Annoyed, Buffy shook herself back to the present. This was now. She wasn't the girl she was then, desperate to feel anything, drowning in the sheer flood of sensation that had swamped her whenever she had been alone with him in the old days. She was an adult now. Adults didn't do stupid things. She had responsibilities.

"Will you just go the hell away?" she asked sourly. She felt naked in front of him, stripped to her bare bones. It was always this way with him; since her last death, he seemed to have gained some power to see right through her. He knew too much. He was staring at her, drinking in the sight of her. The intensity in his eyes pulled at her, now just as much as before. It was like a drug to her, a deep addiction. The withdrawal she had gone through when he vanished not once but twice it had liked to kill her.

"Think you owe me a listen, seeing as how I sat quiet through all of that."

That was it. Like she owed him anything. She hauled off and hit him, the solid, familiar contact almost a relief. This she was used to, fighting with Spike. He would fight back, they would fight. Her life, at least some small part of it, would return to the good old days.

But he just took it. The punch knocked his head back, mussed that pretty new hair of his, and he just stood there. When his lip started bleeding, the slow, thick blood of the vampire, he just wiped it off. There was no anger, no lust, nothing. he was just blank, an empty slate. "I'll give you that. I owed you that. But I want you to listen now."

Buffy turned her back, knowing it was babyish, knowing she would have totally snapped on Dawn for pulling the same shit. She didn't care. He wouldn't fight, he never stayed, what good was he?

He stayed behind her. She heard the creak of the leather pants as he shifted his weight, but that was all the movement he made. After a pause long enough for her to regret staying outside, or even coming outside, he finally spoke. "I knew you'd hate me for leaving. I knew it, but I couldn't stay. It was too much. The soul was driving me crazy. I could feel it eating at me, all the things I had done. It... I'm not some bleeding martyr, sweets, and you know it. Regret ain't exactly my cup of tea. It was driving me crazy. Everything, it was just too much. I couldn't... I had to be alone. I wanted to be whole for you, Buff, not some broken thing you had to take care of. I needed it. And I wanted it for you."

Against her will, Buffy could feel his words run through her, a shiver up her spine, an ache in her gut. But she shoved it down, shoved it away; the time for feelings like that had come and gone two years ago. All that was left now was anger and betrayal. She kept her back to him. "Not enough, that string of empty excuses. Not nearly enough. You bastard. You left the day after I told you I love you. You think I gave a damn what sort of reasons you had?"


	3. Control

And then he did move towards her, a sudden, desperate lunge, like he couldn't stop himself. His arms closed around her, and she could feel the press of his body against hers as he nuzzled her neck, his fangs just grazing the skin. For one brief second, she let herself forget all the years between them and just relished the feel of his body close to hers. No matter what else had gone wrong between them, this had always been right, from the first moment she let herself feel it. But then reality intruded, and it was all she could do not to break his arms for having the nerve to touch her again. He had lost the right the last time he had left her, and it was high time she reminded him of the fact. Feeling almost joyful in the act, she slammed an elbow into his gut to break his hold on her.

"Sloppy, Spike," she taunted, dancing out of his reach and turning to face him again. "Which is it? Are you losing your touch or is it just that you're still in love with pain? Cause if it's the former, I can help you out there. Happily."

His face was expressionless as he stared at her. The move to touch her, hold her, had been the only emotion he had shown since he had said hello. She couldn't adjust to this new Spike, solemn under the mask of his old confidence, an enigma in black. Too much like the Angel of her teenage years, a marked man- vampire- who didn't trust himself to love her. Even Spike's trademark smirk just seemed like artifice, a prop to hide behind. Deep inside of herself, she sighed. She already had one Angel; two would be redundant. Those two years had changed Spike profoundly, it was clear, and the change confused her. She had always thought of Spike as a force of nature, something too elemental to be controlled. But now he was as still as the grave, his face smooth and empty in the moonlight. When he spoke, his words were empty of passion or interest; he might have simply stepped on her foot by accident.

"Sorry about that. My nature got the better of me for a moment. It was hearing you say you love me again."

"_Loved_, Spike. I loved you. Past tense. Very past. You ruined that, like you ruin everything." The bitterness welled up in her again. All the pain that she had felt that morning after waking up in an empty bed came rushing back, and she tried to hide it with anger. "You weren't really kidding yourself that I could still feel anything for you but disgust, were you?"

For a second, a glint of the old Spike, the wicked and wild vampire who had stalked her to the grave and back, flashed in his eyes, but new-Spike stamped it down and simply said, "You said love, not loved. And I'm not too likely to let you forget that, Buffy. I'm back, and I'm staying."

There was something about the way that he said the words, something in the flat certainty of his voice, that made her shiver. This Spike may not have been implosive and charismatic vampire she had known all those years ago, but the nature of his obsession hadn't changed. Anymore than her reaction to it had.

Angry, she told herself. You're angry. There is zero turn-on is obsessive boy saying he still wants you. You're a happily taken woman. But the words weren't convincing, even to herself. Had she really said love instead of loved? Without another word, she turned and bolted for the house, leaving Spike in all his cryptic glory out in the garden. She was too old for this crap.


	4. Lies

Back inside, Buffy went back upstairs to the bedroom and closed the door as forcefully as she could without waking up anyone else in the house. In the room, Angel still slept, still as the dead man that he was, in the big bed they shared. She gave herself a few minutes for her heart to calm down from the shock of seeing Spike again. Thank god Angel was asleep again; awake, he would have already heard her heart beating faster and demanded to know what could have gone wrong on a simple trip to the backyard. He would be less than delighted to know it was seeing Spike again that had her all... all... well, she didn't know what she was, but she didn't like it. Angry, she told herself firmly, I'm angry. What else could she be?

Almost against her will, her mind slipped back to that time, during Willow's little reign of terror, when she brought Dawn to the crypt, only to find out that Spike had vanished into the night without a word to anyone. Well, at least without a word to her. He had, she reminded herself, been more than happy to tell Clem what he was up to. She didn't even know why she had bothered to be surprised all those years ago, didn't know why she didn't feel anything but vindicated when he vanished right before she actually needed something. And she didn't know now why she felt a tickle of the same little rush of excitement that always accompanied an appearance by Spike.

I'm delusional, she told herself firmly as she firmly tamped down any wayward relief at the fact that he hadn't say, staked himself or gone looking for the sun after he vanished that second time. She was only relieved because no one wanted to think that someone they used to sleep with offed himself. It had nothing to do with real feelings, nothing to do with anything. She had a real life now, a life like nothing Spike could have offered her, even if he had ever wanted to.

Quietly, so as not to wake the sleeping vampire in her bed, Buffy crossed the room and lay back down. Reminding herself that it was well after midnight, and she had work in the morning, she stretched her body out in the bed and tried to convince herself that she was tired. If she really concentrated, maybe she could will herself to sleep.

"Buffy?"

Startled, she jerked away from the half sleep she had just managed to reach. "Angel?"

"Who else?" asked the wry voice next to her. " You okay?" A cool hand and arm wrapped around her waist, pulled her closer.

"Yeah, just, you know, all with the awakefulness. Sorry about dragging you into my war with the sandman."

"The more time with you, the happier I am," he said sweetly, nuzzling her hair.

Then she could feel his body stiffen against her and she cursed her bad luck in constantly choosing vampires as boyfriends. A normal, human guy would never have noticed anything out of the ordinary. But Angel's senses were only about a thousand times more acute, and she knew with a sinking feeling in her gut, that he could smell Spike on her skin despite the fact that the other vamp had only touched her for about 30 seconds.

"You run into trouble out there?" he asked, unhappy at not being able to be her knight in shining armor.

"Just some stupid newbie vamp, too dumb to know the Slayer when he saw her," she lied glibly. If he couldn't tell that it was Spike he smelled, she was hardly going to be the one to tell him. Angel would not be happy to know that Spike was back in town, and that was without her ever having told him about the fact that Spike had once upon a time been more to her than a vamp that wanted to kill her.

She was still begging the powers that be that he believed her as she turned to face him just in time to see his nose wrinkle. "You sure? Smells... almost familiar... but I can't place it."

"Smelled one vamp, you've smelled them all," she said, and curled against the cool solidity of his body again. She didn't want talk, she didn't want any reminders of a life that she had that didn't include him. She wanted to remember all the reasons that she loved him, all the reasons she stayed with him. "No more work talk," she chastised, hoping he would just leave it well enough alone, "bed talk."

"Now that idea I like," he agreed, and bent a bit to press a kiss against her throat. "You have any particular conversation in mind?" he teased as he kissed first her shoulder and then her collar bone. She felt the first frisson of heat, the same heat she always felt from him, comfortable, safe. So what if it was no longer the same intoxicating rush that had consumed her when she was a teenager? There was something to be said for familiarity. She told herself that every night.

"Ummm," she sighed, leaning into his kisses. "Your choice," she murmured and laughed as he pulled her into her arms and rolled her beneath his body. Really, sex was over rated. What they had was enough, she didn't need anymore than what Angel could give her. Honestly, she didn't.

Ever since she and Angel had gotten back together, she had done her damnedest to forget that they had ever made love. She didn't want to remember that they had ever had more than what they had now. There was no point to it; she had made her choice. Some nights, though, it was harder than others, and tonight was one of those. Her mind kept taunting her with visions of the one and only time she and Angel been together, the exquisite care he had taken with her, the way he had breathed her name out at the end. To add to the fun of that, those old and familiar memories were now warring with ones she thought she had banished for all time, memories of all her nights with Spike, when they had done a million things to each other and with each other, none of which had anything to do with love.

"You're an animal," she could almost hear his old, cocky voice whisper too, and she remembered the bruises she left on his body. It was better that it had ended; no matter what she thought she might have felt once, the only thing they ever had to offer each other was pain.

She fought to shove the memories of Spike away even as Angel touched her gently, with the adoration and awe he always had when they were together evident in every caress. This is better, she told herself as he trailed kisses down her spine and she moved beneath him. This was all she wanted.

And then Angel's mouth moved lower and she forgot all about any time except this one.

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	5. Acting Out

Buffy was cooking breakfast the next morning, doing the mom thing, feeling spacey and tired. The insomnia had lingered all night long and it seemed like every time she managed to drift off to sleep, something jolted her awake. The paranoid part of her that she always tried to keep at bay kept wondering if Spike was outside the window, waiting by the tree, watching like he always used to. What would he think at her and Angel back together? He was the one who had said that she and Angel could never be just friends.

"My father loves you, you know," said a flat voice behind her and she almost jumped a foot into the air before she could stop herself.

"Jeeze, Conner!" she joked, trying to laugh off the reaction. "Trying to surprise me to death?"

Conner didn't crack a smile, but that was hardly new. "My apologies," he said stiffly, like she hadn't been acting like the only mother he was ever likely to know for over a year now. "I thought you would have heard me enter. Your senses are, after all, superior to that of other humans on this world."

"Yes, Conner. When I'm on patrol. Not when I'm scrambling eggs. Try to make some noise when you walk next time. Now, what was that you were saying back when I was still twenty-three?"

"My father loves you. Very much."

"And I love him," she said warily, wondering about Conner's sudden need to discuss this.

"If you love him, who was that man you were with last night?"

It was all she could do not to drop the spatula. Stay calm, she told herself, struggling for control. It was important to stay calm, especially as Conner was very much his father's son, and excelled at reading people.

Keeping her back to him, she finally managed to say in what she hoped was a normal tone of voice, "He's an old... friend... of your father and me." Hopefully, there were no fates just waiting to strike her dead with lightening for uttering a lie that big. Whatever else she and Spike had been, it had never been friends. And times that by a thousand for Spike and Angel. She mentally crossed her fingers, hoping Conner would be satisfied with that and just let it all go.

"If you were friends, why did you hit him? And why did he kiss you?"

Trust Conner to cut right to the heart of that sick and twisted little relationship of theirs. There was no way she was explaining this to a sixteen year old, no matter how much older he acted.

"Conner! It's none of your business."

He stared at her, his face serious, his eyes intent on her. She had the uneasy feeling that he could see straight through her. She remembered the shock she had felt when Angel had first invited Conner in, followed fast by the anger that Angel had had a child with another woman while Buffy stayed in her home, raising other people's children. But what right did she have to be a mother when there was no telling how long she would live? She matched Conner stare for stare, daring him to take it farther. The kid was no fool, though, and he knew when he was outmatched. After a moment, he nodded brusquely. "What's for breakfast?"

Teenagers. Who could fathom them? With a sigh, she went back to her eggs. "Call Dawnie, Conner. The eggs will be ready soon."

Wordless, he bounded out of the room, for all the world like any kid his age. She sighed again and gave up even pretending to understand teenagers, despite the fact that she worked with them for a living.

"For god's sake, "she muttered to herself, staring into the slowing congealing eggs, "who am I kidding, thinking I counsel anyone? It would take an army of counselors just to figure out my own life."

"What's that?" asked Dawn, slipping into the kitchen with uncommon quiet. "You talking to anybody or are those voices in your head getting too loud to ignore?"

"Ha ha," stated Buffy in a flat tone of voice. But then she looked up and got a hold of Dawn's outfit. "No. Upstairs now and change clothes. People at the school know we're related."

"Yeah, that would be why I can't get a date."

"Up. Stairs. Now."

"Yes, _mother_." With a snarl, Dawn stalked out of the kitchen and stomped up the stairs, every inch the sullen and obnoxious teenager.

Buffy hung her head down, feeling exhausted beyond all sense. Damn insomnia. She was way too young to feel this old. Twenty three. She was twenty three. And Angel hadn't even come down yet for his morning cup of blood.

When night rolled around again, she felt almost ready for it. Stupid as it was, she wanted to see him again. Fighting with him made her feel young. Or at least younger. Took her back to a time when raising Dawn didn't feel like a full time job, when she didn't have a long term honey, a stable relationship that occasionally felt too hard to handle, when she didn't have a spare teenager to raise.

She stepped out the door, feeling strong, feeling sexy; closing it behind her, she leaned against it, knowing she was posing and not even caring. Angel was at the office, doing the detective thing. The kids were at this school thing, first play of the year or something. She was all alone. All alone in the dark. So what if he had left her two years ago? Fighting with Spike made her feel like a whole new person, made her feel like the last few years had never happened. It was so such a relief, there weren't even words for it.

"You here?" she called quietly, knowing he would hear. There were benefits to being a vampire.

"Course I am, ducks. Sun's down, ain't it?" Stepping out of the shadows from under the tree, he sauntered across the yard, all swagger and pride. Same old Spike, even with the black hair and the new cloths.

"You should go."

"You came out. I think you're playing coy."

"Learn a new word?"

"I'm an educated man." He was standing in front of her, staring down at her, that familiar smile on his face, like he had a dirty secret that he just couldn't wait to share. "Thought you were ticked at me? You calm all down?"

"What can I say, I'm in a forgiving mood." Young. It felt so good to feel so young. Buffy smile up at him, knowing she was flirting and not even caring. It had been a bitch of day, three kids in meltdown, missing paperwork and let's not forget Conner's little subtle threat that morning. This was not who she was, working wife and mother Buffy. She wanted to be young and wild Buffy, that one who could be stupid. She was deliberately put out of her mind how awful she had felt during most of that torrid affair with Spike and focused only on the pleasure, the way it took all her thoughts away. She could do with some of that oblivion now.

He fixed her eyes on her face intently, clearly trying to read into her very soul. Apparently he liked what he saw, since he grabbed her arms, pulled her towards him, and kissed her.

There was one delicious moment when she forgot everything but how it felt to be in his arms again. But then he stiffened and pushed her back, his face a mask of shock, fang peeking out, a sure sign his control was slipping.

"Why do you taste like Angel?"


	6. Truth

Buffy hit the door less hard then she would have back during their first go around, and once there, didn't move.

"Okay, that's just weird. How do you know what Angel _tastes_ like? Do I even want to know?"

Little mental pictures were dancing at the edges of her mind, and she couldn't decide if she liked them or found them disgusting. Terrific, she muttered to herself, the great loves of my life and it looks like there may be a lot neither of them have bothered to tell me.

Spike snarled, "You're avoiding the question, Slayer."

Slayer. He hadn't called her that in years, not since he admitted to himself and everyone else how he felt about her. "Isn't avoiding things your stock and trade, Spike? Or am I mistaken and two years haven't really passed?"

"Answer the bloody question, Buffy. You taste like him. Why?"

Angry now, she pushed off from the door and punched him in the stomach as hard as she could. It crossed her mind that beating on him was probably not the best idea; back in the day, that had been their idea of foreplay. He grunted with the force but stayed standing. Once again, Spike refused to fight back, and instead just watched her. Frustrated, she spun away, willing to do anything but look at him. Who did he think he was, coming back this way, disrupting everything? If a person, a demon leaves, he should just stay gone.

"Still waiting here, Buffy." Spike said, and his voice was calm, like he had never been upset. Something was wrong with the world, when punching Spike made him relax. What was wrong with the man- er, vamp? "With Angel-taste in my mouth, nonetheless."

"I taste like him, and again, _ewwwwwww_, because we've been back together for over a year now. We're a couple." Hard to say that to Spike, hard to admit, after last night's fit, that she had indeed moved on. Why couldn't he sound jealous, instead of just mildly curious?

Oh, wait, there went the calmness. Now Spike actually looked like he had been hit in the gut. He sat down on the back step hard, that same step he had sat with her that night when she first thought of him as something like a friend, when he had come to kill her and stayed to comfort her. "What about the curse?" He sounded perplexed, like something in his world had just stopped making sense. 'Bout time something affected that new calm of his.

Buffy sat down next to him, feeling almost lost in the deja vu quality of the night. "Still there." It felt like the past, to be sitting here with him, staring into the night, feeling lost. That first year after she came back from the dead, it seemed like that they had spent ages here, talking about everything and nothing, brought together by the fact that neither of them were like anything else in the whole world.

"That why you just threw yourself me?" Spike asked, sounded only vaguely interested. The lack of emotion in his voice was confusing; who was this and what had he done with the real Spike?

"Excuse me?" Buffy impressed herself by the amount of indignation she managed to bring into her voice. "Threw myself at you? There was no throwing."

"Bollocks. You threw so hard that if I were still in London, you would have hit me."

"That's where you've been?" Buffy seized on that bit of trivia, hoping to leave the whole throwing question alone. She was taken. That whole kissing thing, that had been a moment of weakness on her part, a hope to be something other than what she was. Which was stupid, because she was perfectly happy just the way she was.

He shrugged, the movement so negligible that she could only feel it against her body, instead of seeing it. Against her will, she remembered when there had been so much more.

"Been everywhere. That's where I was most recently."

"You're gonna be all with the cryptic, aren't you?" He could have taken lessons from the old Angel, she thought, until she remembered that he probably had.

"Vamp's prerogative, you know. You ought to know, being all live-in with Angel." There was a pause, and he looked at her sideways. "Leastways, I assume you're living with him."

"Since he showed up. Don't know why you're looking so surprised- weren't you the one who said we would always be in love?"

Spike looked away, his eyes fixed on something she could never hope to see. "Yeah, well, lots changed since then, hasn't it? I was a whole different vamp when I was spouting off like that."

"Doesn't make it any less true. You were right, we really always will be in love."

He turned to face her then, his appearance still that strange mixture of the familiar and the new, now heightened by the play of light and shadow on his skin. His eyes were direct and focused on her when he spoke again. "So, you were in love with him when you said you were in love me?"

"I was delusional then," she said sourly, wishing he hadn't come back that time, wishing she hadn't been so stupid as to have admitted anything to him. Too little sleep.

"Don't wreck it by lying, Slayer. Two years since you told me, and all I can remember is those words. Waited forever to hear you admit that this thing between us wasn't one-sided. I know you, I know when you're lying, and you were being nothing but bone deep honest. I could feel it. That was why I left, cause I knew right then that I couldn't be the man you deserved. Got the damn soul so I could be worthy of you and all that happens is I go insane. Didn't want to be a burden, wanted to be someone who could stand by you. Told you this. You think this is easy for me to admit? You think I'm the kinda vamp, goes around telling the Slayer how weak I am? This is as honest as I can be. Think you owe me the same. Maybe I did wrong be leaving- looking at you know, seeing how angry you are, I can see maybe I did, but I was only doing what I thought was right for you. I'm not asking for a lot from you, I just want you to admit that you meant it then."

Buffy's words were quiet when she spoke again, but she knew that Spike could hear her no matter how low her voice. "You want more than that."

"Yeah, yeah, I do. I want you to admit that you still love me. That's why you came out here, that's why you kissed me- you still love me." His voice rang with absolute surety. That much hadn't changed about him; he had always made overconfidence into an art form.

Buffy didn't say anything after he finished talking. He was asking too much, just like he always did. Spike, always hoping for more than his fair share of anything. What was she supposed to do now? She should have never come out. She should have staked him years ago. She should have done anything but fall in love with the cocky prick.

With a suddenness that caught her seriously off-guard, the back door opened out into the little porch. "Buff..." the voice trailed off in shock as the speaker saw who she was with.

Great. Angel was home.


	7. Dancing

With the grace and speed she had long since grown familiar with, Angel threw himself back into action after the initial shock of seeing Spike on his back step. Striding across the small back porch, Angel grabbed Spike by the collar, hauled him off the step and held him a foot off the ground against the wall.

Almost against her will, Buffy tried to push between them, even knowing that not even Slayer strength could hold itself against two angry vamps. _I'm looking to get myself killed here_, she thought distantly, trying to insinuate herself between her lovers past and present. "Guys! Guys! Angel, put him down, he's different now! He's different! He's got a soul now, Angel, don't kill him!" They two vamps were like rocks, cold and immovable, and still she tried her hardest.

Though her actions were ineffectual, her words froze Angel solid and, taking advantage of the older vampire's shock, Spike managed to wrest himself free from Angel's grip. Stunned, Angel just stared at the vamp who used to call him sire. With his usual cocky defiance, Spike met him stare for stare while dancing just out of Angel's reach. Watching, Buffy thought that it seemed like it took Spike's sire returning to bring Spike to anywhere near what he used to be.

Still stunned, Angel made no move to grab Spike again. "Say that again, Buffy," he said slowly, still staring.

"Lady's right, got all my original pieces back few years ago. Not so much different between us now, mate. In fact, probably less than you think."

Buffy could see it as Spike slide his eyes towards her, making an accurate guess about the fact that she had never told Angel about the two of them. Bad enough that Riley had found out; Angel would have been past disappointed. Although Buffy had to admit to herself that her actions tonight in saving the younger vamp's life had probably given her away more clearly than anything she could have said. She was the Slayer, and this was Spike, and since when in Angel's memory had there been anything between the two of them besides a fight? Angel had to have noticed that Buffy herself had tried nothing to hurt the black-clad vampire.

"Two years ago," Buffy clarified, alternating the direction of her gaze between Spike and Angel. She could practically smell the testosterone in the air. Not for the first time, she wondered how it was that Spike and Angelus had managed to travel together for so long without killing each other. The rivalry between them was obvious from a mile off. "He made a deal with a demon. It didn't go so well," she finished. Why was she defending Spike? He had left her. And yet, no part of her wanted to see one of her lovers kill the other.

"How is it that I've never heard of this?" Angel wondered aloud, but Buffy noticed that he now seemed uninterested in fighting with Spike. Instead, Angel was simply staring at Spike as if it would be possible to find Spike's soul just by looking into his eyes. Spike matched him stare for stare, all of his body language screaming that he wouldn't just roll over for Angel.

"Been out of the country for awhile. Better part of the two years. Doubt your ears stretch as far as I've been." Still that cocky grin, the wicked curve of his mouth and flash of his teeth as he smiled.

"But you two..." and Angel's words took in both Buffy and Spike, as well as Angel's confusion that the both of them were still alive, despite having been alone together on the porch. "How do you even know this stuff. Buffy? You two were enemies..." Buffy could hear in Angel's voice that he was beginning to guess at the truth, and just didn't want to admit it. If she closed her eyes and wished real hard, could she vanish and show up someplace else, where none of this was going on?

So this is what it felt like to have all your lies catch up with you at once, Buffy thought. What was she supposed to say now? Sure, she and Spike were enemies, except that torrid little affair they had indulged in, and the pesky little fact that they had fallen in love without any thought to common sense or decency. Carefully, she tried to think of something to say that wouldn't make this whole situation explode. Spike had seemed more dismayed than jealous to learn of her and Angel, but she didn't think she could count on that kind of a calm response from Angel. Even as Angelus, the homicidal maniac intent on destroying the world, he had been jealous of anything that took her attention away from him.

Somehow, it wasn't a surprise that Spike reacted faster than her. Then again, this had to be just the sort of fact that he had been hoping to hear. Despite his later desire for her to be honest about their relationship, Spike had always gained a certain amount of glee from the power he got through her desire to keep him secret. That had been his biggest weapon while they were sleeping together, that he might tell everything. Looking at Angel's bafflement, Spike only grinned wider, a grin Buffy remembered only too well. With a sinking heart, she listened as Spike gleefully started to speak.

"You meant the Slayer didn't tell it all to her new-old love, Angel? Tsk, tsk, tsk. And to think, some people think a relationship can't survive with basic honesty. Let me be the one to tell you, old buddy of mine, that Buffy and I have been a lot more than enemies. Fact is, if you hadn't come home right when you did there, the girl was about to tell me how much she still loved me." The pride in his voice as he said the words were almost unbelievable; there was no way Angel could miss it.

It was done. It was said. The fight went out of Angel as soon as Spike finished speaking. It was like nothing she had ever seen from the centuries old vampire before. He simply sat down on the porch like a puppet that had had its strings got. Spike chuckled dangerously, a sound Buffy remembered from too many nights that she wished she could forget. Buffy knelt by Angel's side quickly, trying to think of some way, any way, to explain away what Spike had just said. From the look of horrified realization on Angel's face, however, there weren't any words that would make it better. It was probably only a matter of time before he broke out of the shock and tried to kill Spike where he stood.

Spike, on the other, kept up with the gloating, clearly thrilled beyond measure that he could throw this kind of a wrench into the relationship. "Yeah, mate, fact is, Slayer and I were a couple, for a time. And was she ever a bleeding miracle under the sheets. Can't believe you ever told me she wasn't worth a second roll. Girl left bruises on me that took days to fade. Gotta admire someone that can bring that kind of a fight-"

His words stopped cold as Buffy punched him in the face, landing a nice solid blow on his nose. She could hear the bone crack under her hand and even knowing that it would heal in minutes, she took some vague satisfaction from the fact that she could still hurt him.

"Shut up, Spike, just shut up!" This was the Spike she was used to, the one that didn't knew when to shut it. What had she been thinking all those years ago. What had she been feeling, that this was the creature that she had fallen in love with?

Angel was still just watching like he couldn't believe any of this. And to Buffy's amazement, Spike kept gloating, even with his new broken bones.

"That's it, pet, you show him what we were like together. C'mon, love, don't it crawl under your skin, needing what you can't get?" And Spike's voice dropped to a seductive whisper, never mind the fact that Angel could still hear him. "I've seen what you need, Buffy, and we both know you can't get it from Angel. Hell, I had a hard time keeping up with you. Be honest, you came out here tonight cause you needed something more than you're getting."

He was so close that if Buffy moved at all, she would be against him. Angel was still just watching; it was hard to tell what he was feeling. Spike's grin was pure evil, and his eyes were looking straight into hers. Buffy was actually surprised that he would be looking anywhere but at Angel's. drinking in how painful his words must have been, but instead, his gaze was locked on hers like it was impossible for him to look anywhere else. "You know you came out here to find me because you missed me, missed what I could give you."

Her breath stopped. He was so close, so intent, some old Spike, same old Spike that she hadn't been able to refuse. "You know you did," he whispered again, and his voice was seductive, the same voice that had been his every night they spent together.

Oh hell, thought Buffy distantly, trying not to fall under Spike's lure again. Musn't kiss Spike, my boyfriend is watching.


	8. Interesting

With a deep breath, she stepped back. She wasn't doing this. Spike was fun, there was no denying that, but he wasn't worth losing everything in her life that she had learned to value. No matter how she felt about him, might still feel about him, Angel was her present, her future, her family. Without words, she allied herself with the still shocked Angel. But when she looked down at him, as he sat stunned and quiet on the step, he looked up at her with betrayal on his face and it didn't seem to matter right than that she chose him.

"Buffy..." he started, stopped, and then tried again. "Buffy... you and, and... you and Spike?"

She cringed. "It was a long time ago," she tried to explain, but stopped as Angel surged to his feet.

"It wasn't! That was him you smelled like last night and him you smell like tonight and how can you stand there and lie to me? You slept with my childe!"

Okay, now she was angry. "Two years ago in, _hello_, that time when we weren't a couple! That time when you had left me! That time when you were getting Darla pregnant, after all your sad little speeches to me about how we could never have children. Who exactly do you think you are to lecture me about my choices?"

"Then why do you smell like him now? Why can I smell his skin on yours? Why can I smell him on you?" There was anguish in his voice and it hurt her to hear it just as it put her on the defensive.

"Because I kissed him! Because, for one stupid moment, I wanted to forget things in my life. Forget that I have two kids to take care of, neither of which is mine. That I'll never have kids of my own, because you and I, you and I..." she stared up at him, at his beautiful, angry face, at the man she had loved since she was 16 years old. Then she finished, because belated or not, she owed him the truth, "Because you and I can never be... we can never really be together and I tell myself and tell myself that it doesn't matter, that I don't need that one final thing, that I don't need anything but your love..." she trailed off, unable to say that last damning statement. No matter how hard she tried, she didn't think that she would be able to look Angel in the eyes and say that it did matter, despite the countless times she had assured him that it didn't. It wasn't that she had lied to him; it was only that some truths were hard to admit even to yourself. Lost for words, she stared beseechingly at Angel, hoping he wouldn't be hurt, hoping he would understand.

Nope, she thought, looking into his face. No hope for that. He had figured it out and he wasn't happy. "You wanted to forget that you were with me? Because we can't…" he asked, his voice soft and unsure.

_Shit!_ Ignoring Spike entirely, something that seemed to be becoming easier and easier, Buffy stepped up to Angel and took one of his hands in hers. It was cold, but that was normal. It had been years since Angel's heart had been anything but a filler in his chest.

"Angel, I love you. You know that I love you. I love you so much," she was pleading now, desperate to get that look off of his face. "I was stupid. For five minutes, I was stupid. It's been two years since Spike and I were... were anything to each other. I was just surprised. And stupid, have I mentioned stupid?"

Angel was making eye contact, but he still looked devastated.

She figured that he was only making eye contact so she could see how wrecked he was. Or was that pissed...? It was hard call to make, even when he started talking.

"You kissed him. You kissed him because you wanted to forget that you were with me. I sacrificed everything for you, for what we have together, and you wanted to forget?"

With one sudden, aggressive move forward, he grabbed her by the arms and lifted her off his feet as easily as he had lifted Spike. "You wanted to forget?" he repeated.

Buffy struggled in his grip, not wanting to hurt him, not right after she so obviously had. It was an effort to fight down instincts that had been drilled into her since before she even knew Angel. The sheer fight it took with herself to not hurt him was stressing her out even more than the situation warranted. And the situation warranted _a lot_ of stress. God, why did she ever leave the house tonight? Why did she ever get out of bed?

"You wanted to forget?" Angel asked, his voice hoarse from strong emotion.

"Angel, I love you," she reiterated. She could break his hold, she knew that, but what exactly would that do a relationship she had already screwed up? She and Angel had always been very careful, over the years, to not find out who was stronger. The understanding that it was better not to know had always been a clear but unspoken one between them. She didn't want to fight him, but she didn't want to dangle in the air like a fish on the line either. It was at times like these that she remembered again that he had come back different after Conner's little bout of attempted murder- darn that adolescent rebellion. He was still Angel, but the control that had been so overwhelmingly present when she was in high school seemed to take much more effort for him to retain now. Buffy twisted in his arms, running through plans in her mind that would allow her to get out of this without hurting any part of Angel, even in his pride.

Help came from an unexpected source: Spike. With as little effort as Angel, Spike plucked Buffy from his grip and placed her carefully back on the ground, then turned back to Angel, advancing slowly.

"You don't touch her like that," Spike said flatly, glaring at the older vamp, the anger clear in his eyes.

Could this get weirder, thought Buffy to herself, as her loves glared at each other like they were poison. Spike and I used to beat the crap out of each other as foreplay and he's grumpy with Angel for manhandling me? What's wrong with this picture?

Angel was stepping up to Spike, matching his anger perfectly. "You think you have any right to talk to me, boy? How did you touch her? Because I know you, I spent centuries with you and with Dru. I think I know a little something about how you are with your women."

"What do you think is going on here?" Buffy demanded of both of them. "Is this some sort of a pissing contest going back for god only knows how long? What's going on here?"

"He doesn't get to touch you like that!" Spike exclaimed angrily, just as Angel declared, "He only wants you because I have you!"

Okay, this was too much, this was just a headache waiting to happen. She knew she had brought this whole situation down on herself, but that didn't mean that it wasn't driving her insane, trying to deal with it. "Shut up! Both of you just shut up! Spike, you can just pull your nose right out of my relationship with Angel. It's none of your business. Angel, you have no right to comment on anything that went on between Spike and I, much less why he wants me."

They stared at her, both of them angry, both of them upset. She suddenly didn't care. Add their two ages together, Angel and Spike had more than 400 years between them, and here they were, getting ready to fight over her like children or, god forbid, high school students.

She met their stares, Angel's dark, mournful eyes, Spike's ice pale blue eyes, and sighed. "No more. Just no more." Carefully, she took Angel's face in her hands, kissed his lips gently, trying not to be upset when he made no move to kiss her back. "Angel, I love you. I've loved you since I was sixteen. I don't what I can tell you besides that. You are my life, you always have been, even when I never saw you. You have to believe that." With a sigh, she backed away from him and turned to Spike. To both men's surprise, she also took Spike's face in her hands, and kissed him as well. Spike was not as shy about responding as Angel had been, although he didn't get carried away enough to enrage Angel. "Spike. You were right. I meant it two years ago when I said I loved you. And maybe you're still right when you say that I still do. But I can't tell, and even if I did, it wouldn't matter. You left, without a word, without anything. I moved on, you had to know that I would. I'm sorry. But you're too late; Angel and I have made a life together. That's not something that I can throw away."

She looked at both of them again. They looked shell shocked, blank and staring. "And now, if you'll both excuse me, I think I'm going to spend the night at Xander's. Try not to kill each other while I'm gone."

Without another word, she turned her back on them and began walking away.

"Explain it to me one more time," said Xander, laughing. "I don't think I quite understand yet."

Buffy glared at Xander from across the distance of his kitchen table. "C'mon, Xander, quit playing around. I've told you what's up like three times now! You know, you're just playing with my head. Seriously, I came here because I need advice, and since you're in possession of the most stable love life around, you're it. Get with the advice giving."

Even with Buffy's best glare, the one she gave vamps right before she turned them to dust, it took Xander several minutes to stop laughing. Finally, he pulled himself together enough to say, "Buffy, what's the challenge here? Okay, on the one hand, you have Angel, a centuries old vamp that you've been in love since I've known you. You live with him, you're raising two not-quite-human little bundles of joy with him, and the only real problem that if you ever, um, really get physical with him, he turns into an insane killing machine. On the other hand, you have Spike, who, while you always said you loved him, has, let's face it, always been a insane killing machine, and there's nothing more he can give you beside some wicked raunchy sex that you've been missing since you rightfully broke up with him. Buff, it's obvious, you gotta go with Angel. He's the only dad Dawn's ever had. You're the only mom Conner has ever had. This goes pretty far beyond are you getting any. Angel's your blood-sucking creature of the night life-mate."

"It doesn't have to be that simplistic," objected Anya, coming in from the other room and plopping heavily down into one of the remaining kitchen chairs. The pregnancy made her look wonderful, all glowing and happy, but she said it just made her feel exhausted. Xander and Buffy turned to stare at the ex-demon, long past being surprised that at the things she said. "Really, you humans. So narrow minded. Why can't you have both? Stop looking at me like that. Angel loves you. Spike loves you. You love them. And it isn't like those two haven't shared a woman in the past."

Wow, thought Buffy in admiration, that was a train of thought you just had to admire. Not to mention to visuals it inspired...


	9. Uncomfortable Truths

Spike stared at the retreating figure of Buffy until she vanished from even his impressive night vision. "You happy now, mate?" he asked Angel absently, wanting Buffy back as soon as he could no longer see her. After two years without her, he didn't want to waste anymore time. He had forever, but Buffy had been living on borrowed time since her first death, and there was no telling when any fight would be her last. That she had survived this long was a miracle to him. He wanted her back and he wanted her back now. "She's pissed at both of us."

As wrapped up in Buffy as he was, Angel's booted foot landing in his kidney took Spike completely off guard, and the force of it sent him to his knees. "No," said Angel grimly, before kicking him again, "I'm not happy. William."

As Spike struggled back to his feet, the better to fight Angel off, all he could think was shit... the sounds like Angelus. What's gone on since I left?

"You know how I am about my women," the familiar voice ground on, Spike's sire easily dodging the younger vamp's fist. "I'm not into the sharing." Angel, Angelus, whoever the hell he was, was vamped out, eyes yellow, fangs extended. "Buffy's mine, Spike, she's been mine since I touched her."

"She know who you are now?" demanded Spike as he finally landed a blow, plowing a fist in Angel's face. "She know that your humanity is slipping a bit these days?"

"Because you're the poster-boy for normality, Spike?" retorted Angel, as his fist landed in Spike's gut. "Look at you; I can taste the madness on you from here. What's the matter, boy? That soul you got not fitting so well these days?"

"No," grunted Spike as he twisted away before Angel could hit him again. "Bleeding hell, Angel, you think you could stop hitting me for half a second? I'm not gonna fight you."

Angel laughed as he wiped the blood away from under his nose. "Right, I'm bleeding cause of a stigmata."

"Old habits. I've got it under control now and I'm not gonna fight you." He wanted to, my god he wanted to, but he wouldn't. Two years he had spent, trying to become the perfect man for Buffy, to deserve the love she had offered him that last night. He wasn't going to ruin it now. He knew she loved Angel, he had always known it. God knows she had thrown it in his face often enough when she and Spike were first together. He would never win her back by bruising her boy. "C'mon, you poof, you know she wouldn't take kindly to you beating on me. That was always her job to do." He wanted to taunt him further, wanted to throw all his nights with Buffy into Angel's face. In the back of his mind, he could still hear the Angel of years ago, advising him on Drusilla. _Take care of her, Spike. The way she touched me just now? I can tell when she's not satisfied._ Well, Spike knew when his Buffy wasn't satisfied. The way she kissed him, came to him even when she had another vamp sleeping in her bed. Angel couldn't give her anything she needed, and everyone in this little triangle knew it. Even Angel knew it- why else would he be trying to pound Spike's face in? This was a farce, had been since the beginning.

Angel gave a last snarl, but reined it in. They both knew that Spike had a point. Buffy had never had any patience for testosterone driven displays of possession. "Admit it, Spike- that's all I want. I want you to admit that you only want her because I had her- have her. You've always been jealous of me."

Spike stared at Angel, amazed. Two years he had spent trying to get sane for the Slayer and this was what came of it. "That's the kind of credit you give the woman you say you love? That the only thing I might find to love in her is you? You're a raving paranoid, Angel. Always have been, always will be. You want to know why I love her? I love her because she's Buffy. That was enough for you and believe me, it's enough for me, too. There's no ulterior motive here, Angel. Once I fell in love with her, the only times I hurt her was when she wanted me to."

Whoops, wrong thing to say. Angel vamped out again, grabbed Spike by the throat. "That's not true. She's not like that."

Spike almost felt sorry for the poor bastard. That was the tone of desperation he heard in Angel's voice. And he knew that was desperation he had seen on Buffy's face when she first came outside tonight, right before everything went all wrong. Spike knew he was courting death saying anything else but if he could give Buffy anything, he would try to give her this. She was not the woman he left behind, and it didn't take a genius to see that even she missed that woman. The longer this night went on, the more Spike really started to think he shouldn't ever have left, no matter how nuts he was. This was a mess, and no two ways about it.

"Angel, mate, she is. She is. She's the slayer- she lives for the fight. In every aspect of her life. You thought Dru had a few little kinks in her tail? She didn't have a thing on Buffy. You're doing her a disservice, man, being all gentle and loverly. She wants more- she _needs_ more. And I'm not trying to throw a wrench into whatever it is you to have managed to have. I'm a bastard, but you gotta believe I'm trying to do right by the girl. And yeah, I won't deny it's fun to turn the screw a bit into you. But the fact is, I messed up big time, leaving when I did. Left things wide open for you to take what I didn't value enough to keep. And if you're want she wants, maybe I should just back off and let you have her. But I won't let her go through whatever is left of her life with that look I saw on her face tonight. She needs more than you can possibly give her."

I am love's bitch, Spike thought angrily as soon as he finished talking. I'm handing her to him on a silver platter. That sanity obviously didn't take as well as he thought it had, for him to be babbling about ways to make the Slayer happy.

"This is how you love her? You don't have the faintest idea of what love is, Spike. You never did." Angel's voice was wound tight with pain. The Buffy Spike had fallen in love with was not the Buffy Angel cherished.

Spike pulled free of Angel's grip- it had loosened as Spike had explained some of the realities of Buffy to him. "You know that isn't true. I loved Dru, you know I did. And I love Buffy; I loved her even when I knew better, even when every part of me screamed that is wrong." Taking a pause, he stopped speaking and stared at Angel's face. He had known this man for centuries. "And I loved you. So don't start telling me now that I don't know what love is."


	10. Relevations

"Share?" sputtered Xander, clearly torn between laughter and horror. "You want her to take both of them? That's your great advice?"

"I didn't say it was great," said Anya, sounding affronted. "It was just an idea. Back in the demon world, there used to be all sorts of interesting gossip about Angel's little crew of vampires. Not that I ever listened to such things of course; I was busy with my career," she ended primly.

"Yes, sweetie, we know all about what a good little demon you used to be. But I can't believe- what gossip?" finished Xander, clearly fascinated despite himself.

Buffy had to admit she was fascinated, too. She had known both Spike and Angel for years, had alternately fought and loved them, and she had never heard word one about this. "Yeah, spill, Anya."

"Well, all right, but you both know how I feel about gossip. And it isn't like I know very much. I was quite involved with my vengeance back when they were a happy little family."

"Yes, yes, you were a demon among demons. Now spill!" demanded Buffy.

"Well," said Anya, settling into her story with a little smile on her face that showed clearly how much she was enjoying being the center of attention. "I was in Europe for some of the same time that Angelus and his family were there. I won't say that our interests overlapped, but there were a few times when we were both in same place..." she let her voice trail off, playing it for all she was worth.

"Oh, give it up!" yelped Buffy. "I'm dying here."

"Okay, well, you know Angelus turned Dru because he was obsessed with her, had to make her his. But then along comes Spike, and Dru wants him, but she's totally Angel's, so they share."

"At the same time? asked Buffy, trying to rid her mind of the tantalizing images that were crawling through it. Angel and Spike and... She quickly substituted the mental picture of Dru with one of herself and it was all she could do not to shiver. Get it under control, she thought to herself sternly, this is not the place to trail off into to fantasy-land.

"Well," continued Anya, clearly getting into her story, "you know vampires are more, um, flexible in their desires. They both saw something they wanted in Dru and, well, through Dru, they both saw something they wanted in each other."

Yep, there were the mental images Buffy had been trying to keep at bay. Pale, sinuous Spike and dark, powerful Angel... and that would explain why Spike knew that she tasted of Angel. So disturbing, so... wow, yeah. Just pretty much... Why was she hanging out with these two, when there was Angel and Spike and oh my.

"Where you going, Buffy?" asked Xander as she gathered her stuff up and started to head towards the door.

"Um," said Buffy vaguely, "Dawn, you know, is home alone. And Conner, you know what a hard time he has taking care of himself."

"Uh-huh," said Xander, not convinced. Buffy darted out of the apartment to the sound of Anya's laughter.

"Don't bring that up," snarled Angel. "That was a long time ago, and it wasn't me at all. It was Angelus."

"And you know that I've always found your little split personality fascinating. I loved you. Angelus, Angel, you two are the same. The difference would be what exactly? Angel is a hell of lot more whiny? Oh, and yeah, sleeping with the woman I love. No, wait. Angelus did that too. No, I'm really not seeing the difference between you. 'Specially now that I have that pesky little soul problem in common. Doesn't make that much of a difference."

Angel was glaring, his mouth a thin line, but he wasn't saying a word. Spike took in the look on his face and kept talking.

"Did you tell her? About us? That there used to be an us?"

"Did you?" Angel challenged.

Spike looked away for the first time. "Man, you think I was baring all my secrets to the Slayer? When I was trying to get into her knickers? Right, would you have done that? 'Oh, Buffy, oh, Buffy, have I mentioned how I used to shag Angel?' Were you thinking that would have worked? I mean, at least she liked you! I was going against nature, going after her. Did I tell you about our first time? It was up against the wall-"

He broke off when Angel hit him again. "I don't want to know about your first time! I don't want to know about any time. I don't want to know anything about whatever _thing_ you two had, that you call love."

"God's sake, will you bloody well stop hitting me? Told you already I'm not going to fight back. She called it that, too, Angel. She loved me. You heard her say it. And you're changing the subject. What, a few years pass and you can't remember anything? Oh, I'm hurt."

"That's over. Just like you and Buffy are over. It's Buffy and me now. And Dawn and Conner. We're a family."

"You mean like we used to be?" snarled Spike. "That's a fine recommendation for you and Buffy making a go for it. That worked so well for you last time."

Angel glared, bared his teeth, but had nothing to say in response. Giving Spike one least angry look, he turned away and stalked into the house. Just before the door slammed, Spike heard him growl, "Stay away from my family."

"At least two of those people are my family, too," said Spike, not caring that no one could hear him.


	11. Amnesia

By the time Buffy got home, she couldn't quite understand what she had been thinking when she was with Anya and Xander. Spike and Angel? Together? Who was she kidding? She was barely able to handle Spike by himself, the last time they were together. Sure it had been fun when she was with him, but then had come the guilt and the shame and the staggering depression. She was not a woman cut out for the kinky, no matter what Spike implied. Besides, she had Angel now. That should be enough, he should be enough; he had been enough for the last year and a half. Why was she even thinking about anything else than what she had? Angel, her love for Angel, was one of the strongest forces in her life. What was she thinking, wanting anything more than what had always made her happy? With effort, she carefully ignored the quiet little voice in her head that whispered that there were quite a few times when being Angel had made her anything but happy.

As she started walking up the stairs to the front door, she heard a familiar voice call out and turned to see Dawn dashing the last few yards to the house. "Buff! You're home late. Thought you'd be all cozy with Angel, seeing as both me and Conner went out."

"Conner and I," corrected Buffy automatically. She had spent the last six months or so playing grammar police; SATs were coming up and she wanted Dawn to have her pick of colleges, preferably off the Hellmouth. Corny, yeah, she knew it, but there had to be some advantages to not actually being the Slayer, and she wanted Dawn to get every single one of them. Not to mention, correcting Dawn was only about a thousand and one times easier than explaining why she hadn't stayed home with her vamp. "Angel had work and so did I," she answered shortly, making sure nothing in her voice invited questions she didn't want to answer.

Dawn shrugged, not hugely interested one way or another. She joined Buffy in the walk up the stairs. Buffy looked around quickly as she unlocked the door, searching for Spike, but he seemed to be gone. Or Angel had killed him. To cover her actions, she looked back at Dawn. "Speaking of, where is Conner?"

"Met a girl," said Dawn. That might have been jealousy in Dawn's voice, but Buffy was suppressing any knowledge of it. Deep in her heart, she knew that it was impossible for her to convince Dawn and Conner they were brother and sister when they were the farthest thing from it. But not under her roof, damn it. They could wait for college for that. They could wait. Dawn was still a baby at seventeen, and Conner, well, Conner wasn't. Before she could stop herself from thinking it, some part of Buffy whispered that Dawn and Conner were truly not so different than she and Angel had been when they met. Not a thought that she wanted floating free in her head. She had too much else to worry about right now. It was a relief to notice that Dawn herself seemed to be ruthlessly suppressing anything like jealousy that she was feeling.

"Well," Buffy said, "I hope he remembers his curfew." She hoped her voice sounded normal, like she hadn't been thinking any icky thoughts about her baby sister and her sort of stepson.

Dawn snorted and Buffy resigned herself to another round of grounding Conner, while she and Angel both pretended that Conner was someone that had any real hope of controlling. Sometimes it seemed cute that Conner and Angel were trying the whole father/son thing again, but most times it was just useless.

Once inside the house, Dawn kissed Buffy quick on the cheek and headed up to her bedroom, no doubt looking forward to calling Kit and telling her about the evening. Buffy sighed as she watched Dawn bound up the stairs with careless energy, wishing she could even pretend to be that young again. She should go after her, do mothery/big sister stuff, ask how the play was. Instead, Buffy sat down on the couch heavily, wishing she could just rest forever.

Then she heard the kitchen door creak open and realized that wasn't going to happen.

"Buffy, said Angel coming into the room, looking surprised. "I thought you were sleeping over at Xander's and Anya's tonight."

"Well," Buffy said, trying to laugh off the question. "You know those two, way too much sex." Just not the kind you think, she added silently, suddenly lost again in visions of Angel and Spike together. They wouldn't have been gentle with each other, she realized. No part of their relationship could have ever been gentle, they didn't have it in them when they were together. With an effort, she dragged her mind away from those thoughts. Not now, so not now.

Angel looked slightly shocked, "But she's so far along... never mind, I don't want to know. Please don't tell me anything else. I'm sure that Anya will tell me everything whether or not I want to hear it."

"So true," agreed Buffy. "So, Dawn tells me that Conner went off with a girl tonight. She sounded kinda ticked, but I don't think she quite knew why. How long do you think we have before those two realize they're hot for each other? Cause I'm enjoying this calm before the storm phase." As she spoke, she tried to really listen to the sounds of the house. Where was Spike? Had Angel killed him, the vamp he had been with for years?

"Is this your subtle way of telling me you're just going to ignore what was going on before you left tonight? Because that isn't really going to work for me."

"Angel, what else can I tell you? I told you I loved you and that being with Spike tonight was a mistake. What more do you want from me? I'm not going to sit here and repeat what you already know. One fight with you was enough tonight, thanks."

He sat carefully down next to her. She couldn't help but noticed he looked nervous. "I want to understand. I want to know what you see in him. The girl I left all those years ago would never have gone to bed with Spike, would never..." his voice trailed off uncomfortably and it took him a few moments to finish the thought. "Would never have done what Spike is implying you did."

Buffy had just wanted to drop it. She had wanted to just go to bed, alone by choice, wrap some fantasies around her mind and fall asleep to have some really interesting dreams that she would never have the guts to act on. But she was surprised at the anger she felt as Angel implied she was still the high school girl he had loved and left years ago. Why couldn't he see how many ways she had changed? She saw every one of the changes in him, even the ones he hadn't been so up front about. "Is that how you see me, Angel? As that fifteen year old girl you tried to follow to the Bronze? Seriously, you have to stop that. I'm not that person anymore. I thought you loved me for who I am. Isn't that the whole point of us being together now?"

He went on like she hadn't spoken. "He told me about what you liked when you two were together." Angel's voice sounded dead. Great, time two million and twenty when she wound up regretted those few amazingly wrong weeks with Spike.

Okay, she really didn't want to do this, but she also really didn't want things to stay the way they were right this second. Damn it, why did Spike have to show up at all? Why did he have to come and confuse her, make her want things that she could never had? Sure, she and Angel may have been stuck in, well, a huge rut, but that didn't mean she wanted to get out of it. Until Spike so kindly reminded her that maybe she wasn't the happiest she had ever been.

"I was crazed when I was with him, okay? I was desperate, I would have done anything just to feel something. And Spike, he's pretty much push the envelope guy himself. So yeah, maybe we did wind up doing some crazy things. Some of those things, well, a lot of them actually, I'm ashamed to think I ever did. Angel, I like what I have with you."

Really, she did. So the quiet and gentle drove her a little crazy sometimes, so there were nights when she wanted things that Angel could never give her, what was the point of telling him that? He would only get upset.

Angel's face was still and empty when she looked at him, but his eyes seemed to burn with something that she couldn't recognize. He said nothing, just watched her. Finally, she couldn't take it anymore and demanded, "Damn it, Angel, what do you want from me?"

He moved with the sudden speed of vampires that even eight years as a slayer couldn't quite prepare her for and pulled her against him hard. Shocked, her breath pushed out of her in something between a laugh and a gasp and he took advantage of that to begin kissing her.

She had been with Angel, on and off, since she was fifteen. She should know him now, his actions, his responses, but this right now, this was new. He was kissing her with a hunger she had never felt from him before and his hands were everywhere, hard and demanding. In her mind, she could imagine him with Spike, imagine the two of them together, and all it did was make her burn hotter for them both.

"I want to make you forget him," Angel said fiercely and scraped his teeth down her throat, like nothing he had ever done before, and she could feel her brain start to cloud over.

"Dawn...?" she managed to breath out when she could break free of his kisses.

"Will get a hell of an education if she comes downstairs," he agreed, but it was enough of a warning to inspire him to stand and, holding her in his arms, take the stairs two at a time to their bedroom. By the time he threw her on the bed, she had lost the ability to think.

When they were finished, Buffy stretched, feeling empty and languorous. "I didn't know you could do things like that," she said, sliding her eyes to Angel, feeling almost embarrassed by her behavior. That had not been the Buffy that Angel had fallen in love with, that was the one that had been with Spike, wherever and whenever they had wanted.

Angel chuckled low in his throat and curled his cool body next to hers. "Wasn't sure if I could," he confided.

A shiver of nerves crawled down her spine, killing the afterglow pretty damn effectively. "You risked your soul for that?"

He stilled; she didn't doubt that he could feel her anger in her very bones. "I'm that scared to lose you, Buffy," he answered. "I can't give you what Spike could. I can't give you anything I want to, what I've wanted to give you for years. And now here he is again, and he wants you, I can tell he does, and he can give you all the things that I never can, all the things that I never even knew you wanted. And you want him, you can't deny that. I could smell him it on you."

"Gotta love dating vamps," Buffy muttered wryly. Then, in a more serious tone of voice, she added, "Angel, I'm not worth your soul. Nothing is. We've been there and done that and having to listen to my friends tell me to kill you is not something that I want to do again. You can't lose yourself like that again. You have to promise me."

"Do you know what it's like, Buffy? I mean, do you have any idea? I love you, I want you like I've never wanted anything in my life. I want you more than blood. I look at you and I ache and all the things that we can do together just aren't enough. Not for me and not for you. I can't help what I am, what I want. I want..." his voice trailed off and he seemed to catch himself before speaking again, "I want to lose myself in you, I want that one perfect moment of happiness back. I want to forget that it's wrong, I want us both to."

His words chilled her straight through. "Angel, are you listening to yourself? You have to stop talking like this. Why are you acting like this?"

Angel buried his face in the pillow, groaned into it. Strange time to start worrying that Dawn might hear something. "It's seeing Spike again. It's having to listen to him, the things he says about you, about the two of you, about the thr-" his voice suddenly ground to halt.

"About the what?" Buffy asked as she sat up and traced her fingers over the tattoo on his back. As she felt the tense and release of the muscles under his skin, her mind drifted to Spike, the new Spike, goth and decadent in his velvet and leather, and she wondered what his tattoo was. Damn, no wonder Angel was worried; here she was, trying to comfort him and who does her mind wander to but Spike? Maybe Angel had a point. "About what, Angel-love?" she prompted, when his silence went too long.

"Nothing, he muttered into the pillow, but all his muscles had turned to rock under her hands, a sure sign that he was lying.

"Okay," she sighed, and turned away. If that was the way he wanted to play it...

"No, Buffy, I'm sorry. It's that... seeing Spike again, talking with him... it reminds me of the old times, and I don't really want to think about them. It reminds me of being Angelus."

"Is that it?"

"Isn't that enough? Buffy, he told me things tonight I never wanted to think about. He told me things about you that I never wanted to know." He paused, took a deep but unneeded breath, "He reminded me of things about myself that I would rather have forgotten. He made me doubt everything you and I have ever been to each other. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I told you! I was ashamed."

"But you loved him?" he pressed.

"What do you want to hear, exactly? Yes, I loved him. Yes, I slept with him, yes, I did things with him I never thought I would do with anyone. You want details? Is that what this is about? You want to hear about the time in the Bronze, or maybe the time outside the Doublemeat Palace? You want to hear about the handcuffs? It was the past, Angel. I don't ask you what you did with Darla, or Drusilla, or, god forbid, Cordelia." She paused, looked at him as he lay unmoving on his stomach. "I don't even ask you about what you did with Spike."

Like he had been staked, Angel twisted over and sat bolt upright. There was a stunned look on his face. "He told you? He swore he didn't, he wouldn't."

Buffy felt her lips twist. So Anya had been right. "No, he didn't. Anya did. And you, just now."

"I... never wanted you to know that," his voice was embarrassed, but she thought she could feel his body respond to the idea; he was moving a little uneasily now.

"Yeah," she agreed ruefully, "tell me about it. I never wanted you to know either."

Her response startled Angel into a laugh, and he wrapped her arms around her in a hug. "I love you, Buffy."

She rested her cheek against his head, breathed in the scent of him, as familiar to her as her own. "I love you too, Angel."

Now, if only we could work out what to do about the fact that I think we're both still in love with Spike.


	12. Drowning in the Past

Mornings left Angel dead, literally. Whenever Buffy woke, it was always to see him resting still and cold next to her. Sleep robbed him of all the little tricks of humanity he had perfected over the centuries, tricks like breathing and occasionally moving. It was eerie, seeing him as he rested; no true human could stay as still as Angel. Everything about it was unnatural, but she had grown to love that as well. Sleepy still, she took a moment to study the man, no, the vampire, that she had chosen to share her life with. His hair was still thick and tousled, his unaging face still held hints of the boy he must of once been all those decades ago, back when his heart still beat. Careful not to wake him, she traced the outlines of his familiar features with a finger, not actually letting herself touch him, just letting herself remember all their years of history. His cool skin absorbed the heat from her finger as it hovered over his face. She wondered how long it would be until she looked older than him, if she would live that long.

She had never been quite sure what had brought Angel back into her life. One day he had just shown up, Conner in tow, and said, very simply and very sincerely, that leaving her had been the stupidest choice he had ever made. She could only stand in the doorway and stare, because nothing in her life had ever made her think that he would come back this way, come back to her at all. Angel was a drop in, drop out kind of a guy; he never came back to stay. Eventually, clearly taking her silence as refusal, he added hesitantly that he had always loved her. It had been over a year now, and he had never given her a reason for his return, had never offered her any explanations on what about his life in L.A. that brought him back here. After awhile, she stopped asking.

Buffy remembered numbly stepping aside to let him and the kid into the house, hastily re-inviting Angel when it became clear that the significant amount of remodeling that Xander had done to the house had managed to cancel out Angel's earlier welcome. The first few days had been awkward, trying to get used to Angel's presence in her life, all the ways that it changed things. It had taken her so long to figure out how to live without him that she no longer knew how to be with him. Some days she would just sit and watch him, drinking in the sight of him, it was that hard to believe he was real, that he had come back. At first he had slept in the basement, far away from the light, far away from her and the temptation he made her feel. What was she supposed to do? What did he want from her, what did she want from him? What could possibly be left for them? It was easier to have him out of eyesight.

It had been a week before anything really happened between them. They had been sort of carefully dancing around each other, as they tried to figure out if there was any way that they could be anything to each other again. Buffy had never told Angel, because why would she, but she had been terrified about trying the whole romance thing again. Spike had been her last... her last who knew what and god knows that had been nothing to brag about, any part of it. Especially the part where he booked out of town as soon as she admitted she actually loved him. After that fiasco, why would she even want to try another relationship? And she was scared, really very scared, that no man would ever stay in her life. For all that she tried to reach out, tried to be honest with her feelings, all her lovers left, one by one, until she had started to wonder if it was some curse of being the slayer, that she would always be, at the heart of things, completely alone. So though she had seen Angel watch her with that old, familiar heat in his eyes, she had been too nervous to act on it, wondering if he too would be gone the next morning, or, even worse, be Angelus. She wondered how she had ever found the courage to kiss him, all those years ago, when she was so scared now.

Angel must have grown tired of waiting though, because one day while she was making tea in the kitchen, he had reached out and laid a single cool hand on top of hers and somehow that touch, the sheer fact that he had reached out for her, combined with the fact that he had come back for her, hit some strange cord in her memory. It was nothing she could really recall, just a strange sense of deja vue as he touched her hand, and then she was lost and they were kissing, really kissing after all those years, and it was really him, arms wrapped around her. They managed to get control of themselves before they did anything that might cause Angel to lose his soul happened, but from that day on, there had been no turning back. They had been a couple again. He had come back. To her. For her. No one had ever done that before. She was determined to keep this one thing, when she had lost so much else. She absolutely refused to lose him again.

He was not, Buffy reflected now, as she watched him rest, quite the Angel that she had loved so desperately back in high school. There were flashes of something different, something deeper, moving under the surface, but whatever it was, Angel seemed content to let it lie and she wasn't going to fight him on that. Let him have his secrets. She was, after all, not quite the girl he had known. Everyone grows up, even the undead.

Damn. She loved him, she really did. Mysterious, unspoken of past, sullen teenage son that wasn't hers, brooding silences and all, she loved him. And that was why she was so scared now. Spike showing up again confused things, threw her carefully ordered world so far out of sync that she had no idea how to make things right again. The careful puzzle-pieces of the life she had put together with Angel, Conner and Dawn were all being pulled apart. Last night with Angel had shown how fragile that life had been, seeing how far he would go just to convince her that he was the one for her. She didn't want Angel to prove his love for her, only to wake up next to Angelus.

But what to do about Spike? Seeing him was like seeing a ghost, like sliding back through time. She could still picture that old Buffy, brazen because really, what did she have to lose? A life she wasn't sure she really wanted, now that she had it? A world of responsibilities on shoulders that had only recently been nothing but bone and the memory of muscle? There should be nothing about her memories of Spike that brought her any happiness, nothing she should be wistful for, but there it was. She missed him, his tough bravado and his glass sharp sense of humor. She missed how she felt when he looked at her, like a goddess, like a devil, like the only woman in the world. She had never meant to fall in love with him, wasn't quite sure how it happened. She only knew that, bit by bit, she had realized that she could not imagine a life without him in it, sarcastic and sniping, cynical and hopelessly romantic, all at once. So then, like a fool, she had told him, and he was gone before the sun rose again. Jerk. And even with everything else in her life now, she still felt that pain of his disappearance, the nagging sense of something left unfinished, only put on pause. The past crowded around her, heavy and insistent, every time she thought of him, every inch of her reminding her why it was she had loved him in the first place, even against her own commonsense. Losing him had been like losing some part of herself that she had never even known that she had been hers until he tore it.

She had to do something about this. She had to finish the past so that she could get on with her present. She had to end things with Spike. Deep in her mind, her conscience skittered and whispered to her, reminding her that if it was this hard for her to see Spike again, that she should imagine how hard it was for Angel to deal with him again, with the past he had never wanted Buffy to know, a past with Spike. Though her mind traveled to a thousand wicked places when she tried to picture that, she couldn't imagine what they had actually been like together. She was trying hard to not imagine it.

Feeling all tangled up in confusion, Buffy got up of bed, and made her way to the shower, where she washed all of the memories of last night off of her skin. It had been good, very good, but then had come the fear, that they had come to close to losing Angel's soul again, and now she just wanted to forget that he could do things like that before she got to needing it again and again. God, she ached. Angel was good, very good; she wanted things he could never give her again.

Despite the fact that it was a non-class Saturday for Buffy, Angel was almost sure to sleep in. Though he tried to keep as human a schedule as possible, there was no escaping the fact the he was meant to sleep the day away. Which, today at least, was just fine for her. She wanted to, needed to, had to, find where Spike was and the less company she had for that, the better. There were things she needed to say to him, things that had been unsaid for much too long. This had to be put to rest. Everything else in her life was in danger until she managed to lay all of her old ghosts. This insane love triangle, threesome thing had to end. She couldn't take the stress of it.

She tried the old crypt first because she remembered him saying that, since he died, he didn't like the feel of human homes. They reminded him, he said, of all the things he had loved and lost that night he gave himself up to Drusilla. He couldn't stand the taste of that much humanity around him around anymore, that it made him feel every inch of the monster he was. She strode in like she owned the place, because that was the only way to be with Spike, strong from the start so even if, at some point, you became weak, you still had the memory of strength to hold you up when everything went wobbly. She needed any advantage that she could get.

It was dark in the crypt, and dusty, and as soon as its walls closed around her, she could remember everything that she and Spike used to do in there. Two years later and muscle memory still sent a thrill down her spine. There was almost no part of this place she could look at that didn't carry a reflection of their shared past. She shivered, wishing again that she could put it all behind her and knowing that she couldn't. Just the fact that she had come back here was proof of that. Why couldn't she ever get over any man? Why was she always haunted by these things?

"Spike?" she called and was proud of herself for the confidence in her voice. "Spike, you here?"

A pale and glimmering body pulled itself up gracefully from the tunnel to the basement, made the shadows its own. "You don't have to shout, pet, the shadow said, I've never been deaf."

"Spike."

"In the flesh, as it were," he said and took a step towards her, predatory, beautiful.

The look of Spike/Not-Spike was still new enough to hit her like a blow. There was so much about him that was familiar: the cocky tone of his voice; the arrogance that suffused every inch of him; the way he walked like he was hunting. But now there was the black hair, and the black tattoos standing out like stains on his too-white skin. He had his shirt off and she could see that there was actually more than one. The tattoo she had spotted the other night, the mere tip of it peeking out from the loose shirt, was reveled to be some kind of an elaborate stylistic dragon curling over his shoulder. The other, completely new to her, was a small omega sign wrapped around his right nipple, which, she couldn't help but notice, was now pierced by a delicate silver ring. Buffy was staring, she knew she was, but she couldn't quite look away, seeing as she had become hypnotized by the sight of his bare chest. She whispered to herself angrily, reminding herself that she was only here to put the past where it belonged. It was not that she could not resist the sight of him.

"See something you like, love?" he asked sardonically after noticing her stare. As he spoke, he took a slow step towards her. Buffy could feel the blood rise to her face saw how it caught and held his interest; it was the blood that drew him in, an aphrodisiac that no vampire could resist. In front of him, she felt powerful, beautiful. Feeling a little evil, feeling exactly the way he always made her feel, she let her head drop to the side, giving him a clear view of her neck and the artery that ran through it, a clear view of the scars left by Angel and Dracula. Vampire foreplay was not human, but it could be learned. Spike's eyes tracked her movement, locked on her neck like he couldn't look away. When he spoke again, his voice sounded more strained than it had only a few moments before. It wasn't just the lure of blood and sex stretching his voice out, either. Buffy knew it was also the reminder that she had never allowed Spike to mark her, never given to him what she had to the others. Anger and lust mixed together in his rough face and the sound made her shiver. "What do you want, Buffy?"

Buffy tried to beat down the guilt that tried to creep in on her. This was not about Angel; he had no place here. This was just to say good-bye, just to put an end to things. She took a step towards him, as slow as his had been, closing the gap between them by inches. This would be simple. It wasn't about need; it was just about closure. "I want to get you out of my mind. I want to get past you, over you."

"You want me," he said, agreeing with only the first half of the statement. "So you left your precious Angel and came to me." He moved another foot towards her, slow and sinuous, sex walking.

"He's sleeping." It was not a strong defense. She should have said something about Angel knowing, she should have lied. She had never been good at lying to Spike. Her turn for a step; somehow, she doubted that she did it as well. She was shaking and she didn't even care. The accusations were chasing all her rationalizations all through her mind, one following the other so quickly that she could barely follow them. She was dizzy with the speed of them.

"So I shouldn't think this is a permanent thing, then?" Spike looked furious with himself as he took another step forward, but whatever his feelings were, they weren't strong enough to keep him from moving closer. A quick glance down showed why; Spike had never been that could at controlling his baser nature.

"He'll wake up soon enough and I should be there." There, that sounded good: A time line, a set ending. She took another step forward, almost against her own will. Now there was only twelve inches between them. If Spike were alive, she would have been able to feel the heat from his body.

"Smelling of me?" Spike asked in a whisper, the words seeming to be dragged out of his body by some force stronger than himself. He seemed to basking in the warmth of her, the scent.

"Depends how hard you're trying," she answered, all good sense out the window when she was standing this close to him and it had been so long. This was good-bye, nothing more, nothing less. But even as she told herself that, she knew at least part of her was lying. She was here because she couldn't stay away. She tried to feel guilty about that, about this betrayal of everything she had with Angel, god knows that she had felt bad enough coming here, but it was like Angel's Buffy and Spike's Buffy were two very different people and what the one felt had no bearing on what the other did. And Angel's' Buffy was long gone now, replaced by Spike's rough and ready lover.

Spike was fighting himself, it was clear, and it frankly surprised her. Who knew that Spike cared enough for human morals to feel anguish over the fact that she wasn't coming to him a free woman? Who knew he would have any guilt at all about borrowing her temporarily from Angel? Who cared? She had made up her mind, had thrown caution to the wind, and she just wanted him to do the same damn thing. She burned for him despite all the times she told herself she wasn't interested in him.

"You've got that white picket fence and everything." As last-ditch arguments went, it lacked something. She was pretty sure, however, that he was making a point in there somewhere. She was pretty sure that she didn't care. She had already lost and he was losing. There was only one way this could end, and then she would finally be free of him. Then she could back to Angel as only one Buffy, with no missing pieces.

"This isn't forever, you know," she stammered, Angel's Buffy talking out of Spike's Buffy's mouth, a startling change. "It's really important that you know that. I just... I keep remembering everything that I thought I forgot and I just keeping hoping that if I..."

"Screw me?" he suggested crudely as she trailed off, struggling for words. Buffy could feel all the breath knock out of her at his response, but the images in her head couldn't be denied anymore. Whatever she had planned for the end of her sentence, whatever very important truth she had been planning to tell him there, it had been knocked out of her mind by the glint in Spike's eyes. Angel's Buffy fled from that frankly carnal look and the rest of her rejoiced. This was what she needed, a vacation from reality. Screw Spike? She could do that.

"Pretty much," she agreed and then his arms were grabbing her, just as hard as they used to be, and there was no room at all between them, not even room to breath, to think. Which she didn't care about at all because it was Spike kissing her again, Spike touching her again, and it was everything she had tried to forget in Angel's arms and Angel's bed and couldn't. And when he lowered her to the floor and reminded her of a few more things, she almost forgot about Angel entirely. The last thing she remembered asking was, "So, what else did you get pierced?" and his wicked, knowing chuckle as he answered with, "Just you wait and see." And then it was all feeling, no brain involved at all. And that was just fine with her.

When they were finally done, when she had finally lost the hunger that had burned through her at the mere sight of him, she lay in his arms and just rested, strangely comforted by his closeness. She loved Angel, it was like a deep river running through her life, that love for him, but she loved Spike too, and there were some times when that was easier to remember than others. If Angel was the river, Spike was the ocean with all its tides, pulling her in and pushing her away, a force of nature she had no control over. As she watched, he was trailing one black-nailed finger down one of the blue veins in her breasts, his eyes running over every inch of her skin like he was trying to memorize her.

"Christ, I missed this," he said lazily, his voice sounding sated, heavy and tired.

"What, sex?" she retorted. She had never known what to say to Spike after they had been together, had always felt confused. When she wanted him, that was the only thing in her mind, but the confusion came afterwards, when she remembered that he was supposed to be her mortal enemy. The guilt was starting to drift back again too, washing back in as the tide receded, but she felt almost too good to care.

"Sex with you," he corrected. "There's been no one else, Buff. Not since there was you. No one else smelled right, felt right."

"That skank at Xander and Anya's almost wedding?" she asked, disbelieving.

"Not you," he repeated quietly. "No one was you. All this time, if it wasn't you, it was my hand and me wishing it was you."

"Gross, Spike, I didn't want to know that," she protested, trying to pretend that it wasn't a rush to hear that. No one else? Not once, not even a drunken one-night stand. Without her prompting, her mind started drawing pictures of Spike, all alone with his hand, calling her name. She fought the urge to curl into his cool body, resisted it because they had never had that kind of a relationship, because that was not why she was here, was not why she had come.

"So, how long had it been for you then?" he asked, laughter lurking in his voice.

Buffy stayed quiet for a minute, not wanting to feed the pride she could almost see growing under his skin. But she finally gave up and answered, "Since you left," and almost didn't mind when he immediately began gloating. A last little piece of attitude however, forced her to add smugly, "Didn't need it with Angel."

"Almost didn't need it," he corrected, his voice underlining that first word. "You're forgetting who just spent a fair amount of hours with."

"Hours?" she repeated in shock, and all the thoughts of Angel that she had forced back came rushing forward and she was almost drowning in guilt now. "Oh my god, what have I done? Spike, what am I going to tell him?"

Spike rolled over onto his back, rested his head on his folded arms. "Sort of hoped you had that planned out before you came here." His voice was cool, distant, pissed, the way he had always sounded when some action of hers reminded him that nothing between them had ever been meant to last.

"It was a good plan in my mind," she muttered, searching around for her clothes, trying to absolve herself of any wrong doing. This was good-bye. Things were finished between her and Spike now, really they were.

He had nothing to say to that, simply watched her as she pulled on her clothes, fought with her hair. She was struggling to go home looking like she hadn't just spent hours in another man's bed. Or floor. She had come here trying to lose her desire for him, hoping that she could just get him out of her system and then go home to Angel. So far, the plan seemed to have failed, but maybe it was because he was still naked and staring at her with heat in his eyes. She so had to get out of here, had to escape before she ran away from Angel and all her responsibilities and threw herself right back into Spike's arms.

As she was ducking out the entrance, Spike's voice calling her name stopped her. "Buffy? Love? Just answer me one question before you go scampering off. Why are you with him?"

She looked into the sunlight, into all the places that neither Spike nor Angel could go. "Because I love him. And because you weren't there." The streak of cruelty he had always brought out in her was back in force and she welcomed it, because it made it easier to walk out on him, back into the sun, back where he couldn't follow. She had a family to get back to.

"You're late," said Angel, startling Buffy as she tried to slip quietly into the kitchen. "I'm sure you meant to leave Spike's a lot sooner."

She sat gingerly at the kitchen table, wincing at the stretch of muscles that, after a year, she had almost forgotten she had. The guilt came washing back again, almost crushing in its weight. "I'm sorry. I didn't want you to know."

"Because that was a real challenge." His voice was flat, emotionless, and she couldn't get any feel for how he was taking this.

"We needed to talk."

"That would probably be more believable if you had taken a shower before coming home. Were you thinking that I wouldn't smell him on you? You reek of my childe." His voice rumbled like thunder as he spit out the last sentence.

"Dru's childe," she corrected warily, trying to figure out where he was going with this. Strange, but this wasn't the route she had expected that his anger would take. Sure, he sounded jealous, but it didn't really seemed to be directed at Spike.

"Mine," he said with a snarl, and she pulled back a bit, startled.

"Okay, yours," she agreed hastily. She had never understood the relationship between Spike, Dru and Angel and the recent revelations weren't making that relationship any easier to figure out.

Silence fell as Buffy watched Angel struggle with his rage. She hoped the kids were out, doing normal human things. If this went bad, she didn't want them here. Angel was visibly holding himself together, forcing a layer of calmness over an almost feral anger. There was a glint in his eyes that she hadn't seen since she had last fought with Angelus and it scared her. She wondered again if last night had brought them closer than they should've gotten to losing his soul. Could they lose pieces of it? A slice here, a slice there, until the man she loved was just a shell over a totally different creature. Maybe he was only have the man he was before.

"Why?" he finally asked carefully. "Why did you go back to him?"

"So I could forget him. We never had a proper good-bye." Even as she spoke, she knew she was lying. She had gone back because she couldn't stay away, because something in her needed something in him. Angel's eyes on her were dark and intent; he didn't believe her either. She tried to pretend she wasn't afraid of what she saw in his eyes, what she saw in his face, but she couldn't convince herself of that. He had noticed her fear, he was drinking it in like blood.

Suddenly he smiled, not his usual one, but a hard, mocking one. Uneasily, Buffy stirred under the heat that had suddenly appeared in his eyes. The smile grew until it bloomed into a full-grown laugh and Buffy's nervousness grew.

Angel laughed and laughed; he laughed until he was drawing in unneeded breaths just so he could laugh more. Shocked, Buffy could only stare. Who was this and what had he done with her real boyfriend?

Eventually, Angel calmed down to stand. He dropped an almost absent-minded kiss on the top of her head. You know what, love? Now that you remind me of it, I remember that neither did I. Whistling, he strode out of the kitchen and down the basement steps, towards the tunnel he had connected to the city sewers so he could get around during the daytime. Buffy stayed where she had sat down, feeling frozen in place, listening to the sound of his passing grow fainter and fainter. Where was he going? What had she brought to the surface?


	13. Strange New Honesty

"Spikey? Oh, Spikey?" Angel's tone of voice was mocking as he called out to Spike. Muttering curses under his breath, Spike crawled out of his makeshift bed and began the walk to the tunnel entrance, stopping only to pull on his black leather pants. How the hell had Angel found him here so fast? Spike had been hoping for more time before Angel came a-calling to take Spike to task for bedding his woman. He had wanted enough time to try to figure out how to make it happen again.

Lighting a cigarette, Spike threw open the tunnel door to see Angel framed in the doorway. Angel looked... good. Pissed, but good. Black jeans, loose burgundy velvet shirt, hair mussed like he had also just crawled out of bed with Buffy himself.

"Yeah, you bloody poofter? You here for a reason?"

Fake cool, that was the plan. Angelus would have had some interesting punishments in mind if that had been Dru Spike had been with all alone, Dru who had come home looking like Buffy had. Of course, Angelus was long gone. This was Angel and anything he might do to Spike wouldn't hold a candle to anything the soul-man's old self might have done. Bleeding travesty, it was, the mess that a soul had made of a once perfect monster. Taking a deep breath, Spike blew out cigarette smoke at Angel and smirked as Angel drew back briefly.

Angel stepped in to the basement, as it were, of Spike's crypt and looked around. "Cozy," he said, as if Spike hadn't spoken. "How do you keep this place up, seeing how often you leave?"

Bit of a bite there, Spike reflected, but still controlled enough to be ignored. "Got myself a crypt-sitter as it were. Demon by the name of Clem."

"Yeah? You know, for all your big words about how much you love my woman, I think you've left her even more than I have." His voice was idle, almost disinterested. He was examining knickknacks like he didn't have a care in the world. He might have been talking about the weather, except for the occasionally shiver of fury that ran through Angel's words.

"Nah, mate," retorted Spike. "You and I are tied. Two for the both of us."

Angel continued on like Spike hadn't answered. "You know what excuse Buffy gave me for coming here, Spike? You know what excuse she gave for coming back smelling like you?" Angel was pacing casually threw the area, at time stopping to study some things in greater detail. He lingered at the pale blue sweater that Spike had kept through everything, fingering it as if he knew who it had belonged to.

"Haven't a clue. That she needed a good f-"

"Don't!" gritted out Angel through clenched teeth, interrupting him. "Don't use that word with her. Don't. Because I didn't come here to kill you, but if you push me, I will."

It had been a long time since anyone had accused Spike of being stupid. "Fair enough," he agreed carefully, making sure he said and did nothing that would inspire Angel to rip his head off. But then Spike looked at Angel, all stiff muscles and tight clenched wrath, and had a sudden, panicky thought. "You didn't hurt her, did you?"

Angel smiled then, not Angel's smile, and said, "Hurt her? No, I threw her against the wall and-"

"You didn't," Spike broke in flatly. "I would know."

"No, you're right. I didn't lay a finger on her," Angel said in that strangely calmly fierce voice. "I just asked her why she came. And what she told me was that she came here because you and she never had a chance to say good-bye."

Spike stiffened. Had she really said that? Was that just a good-bye tumble, some act from the past that she needed to get out of her system? It pissed him off to know that Angel could read every line of his body and knew that Spike had been rattled by his words. Angel was stalking like some hulking jungle cat through the crypt, almost behind Spike now, but Spike refused to turn around and give Angel the satisfaction of knowing he was making Spike even the smallest bit uneasy. Angelus he had known, and Angel, but this strange combination of both was something else entirely. What exactly was Angel these days?

"So why are you here? You already said it wasn't to kill me, so what's left, Angel? What else is there to say?" Spike knew that his voice fairly screamed of faked casualness, but it was the best he could do.

"Maybe," said Angel from directly behind him, much closer than Spike would have liked, "I didn't come here to talk at all. Maybe I didn't get what I wanted from Buffy." His hand, larger really than Spike remembered, closed over Spike's shoulder and the younger vampire felt a shiver go through him. What the hell was Angel about, playing these games? He stayed as still as possible under Angel's hand, caught by the dual facts that not only did he refuse to beat on Buffy's boy, he was also halfway to liking the feel of Angel this near again, Angel with no intent to harm him. The grip tightened some and Spike mentally adjusted his thinking. No intent to _kill_ him. They hadn't really covered the issue of harm.

"Maybe," Angel breathed in his ear, "I remembered that you and I never got a real good-bye either."

No longer able to stop himself, Spike turned to meet Angel's eyes. They had gone vampire yellow, a level of control over the change that Spike hadn't realized that Angel could do. For a long time, the two vampires only stared at each other, neither moving, all the little mimics of humanity they wore around humans totally banished. They could have been statues in a wax museum. An awfully strange wax museum, Spike reflected, given their poses, but statues nonetheless. At long last, Angel broke the tableau. With a glint of fang, he lowered his mouth towards Spike's neck. With a shudder of desire, fear, acceptance, who knew, Spike allowed the touch for a moment, relished the cool, hard, wetness of Angel's mouth on his skin, the pressure of it. It was only when he felt the sharp bite of Angel's fangs into his flesh that he pushed the other vampire away, shaken, confused, turned-on.

"No," Spike said hoarsely, "not that way." And he pulled Angel towards him, kissing him deeply for the first time in nearly a century.

For one dizzying minute, it was like traveling into the past. They had been here before, Spike and Angel had, and for the first touch of Spike's lips on his own, Angel forgot where and when he was and just kissed Spike back, letting himself get lost in the moment, in the feeling of everything he had denied himself for so long. Of course, back then, it had never been Spike who would have started the kiss, but this was a hundred years later and Angel realized he no longer cared who kissed and who was kissed. Spike had gotten better at kissing in the last hundred years, or maybe Angel had just forgotten what it was like to kiss him, but now he wanted to just sink into the kiss and never come out again. Spike tasted of smoke, old blood, stale beer, and Buffy. For one moment, the jealousy swamped him, and he deepened the kiss, trying to suck the taste of her out of Spike's mouth. He didn't know what he was more jealous of. Why had he come here again, starting something that had been dead and buried for decades. With a low snarl, he pulled back from Spike, breaking the kiss.

Spike had at first grabbed Angel back to keep the kiss going but then reality seemed to come back to him as well and he let Angel go without a protest. Spike was trying to play things cool, but Angel's sharp eyes had seen his hand shake as he brought his almost forgotten cigarette back to his lips. He drew in a smoke-filled breath, held it and then blew it back out carefully before speaking. "So was that in the nature of revenge, then, mate? Cause I think that part of our lives is very much over."

Angel floundered, at a brief loss for words. "I... don't know. What reason did Buffy give you?"

"I'm thinking that's between me and the lady." Cold voice there, interesting. Angel could actually start to believe that maybe Spike did care for Buffy, in the strange way that only he was capable of. Certainly shy reticence was not his normal mode of behavior.

Carefully, Angel studied Spike. The vampire was tense, his muscles looking as hard as stone, his eyes fixed carefully on Angel's hands, trying to judge the level of threat Angel presented. Spike was only half dressed, and Angel spent a moment studying the new tattoos with interest, noting with humor that the longer he stared, the more uncomfortable Spike looked. "You really love her, don't you?"

Spike looked up, some unreadable emotion in his eyes. "Yeah, I do. So what exactly is it that you're jealous about, Angel? That I had her when you can't, or that she had me when you won't?"

Angel ran his hand over the sweater. Buffy's, and no doubt about it. Spike had always been one for taking trophies. The feel of it under his hand was soft, almost unfamiliar. Spike must have had it for quite some time, Angel thought. She wasn't much of one for softness these days, life and death had made her harder. The years change everyone. They had even changed him.

"I can have her," he whispered, somehow not believing he was telling Spike of all people this, when he had never told anyone else. "Since I came back, I've been able to. I just haven't."


	14. Secrets

There was a long moment of silence as Angel for Spike to take this in. The younger vamp's reaction was pretty much what he had expected. Spike looked first stunned, then incredulous, finally broke into a sort of appalled laughter. "Perfect. No bloody wonder," he managed to squeeze out through laughter, "she was so ready for me then. You've been sleeping in the same bed as the slayer for a year now and you've haven't touched her? I hope you aren't here wondering what the hell she was doing with the likes of me, then."

"I touch her, I just don't... "Angel trailed off, unable to actually say the words in front of Spike. By the time Angel could meet Spike's eyes, the younger vamp's seizure of laughing had finally trailed off and he was staring at Angel with a look that clearly said he thought his grandsire was an idiot.

"You aren't making a bad joke, are you?" he asked, already seeming pretty clear on the answer. "Christ, if you aren't the biggest martyr under the bleeding sun. I don't care what sins you feel like you've got to purge, no need to drag Buffy into your little yen for redemption. She's not that little school chit you could dazzle all those years ago, mate. She's a woman, and if this morning was any example, you've left some needs of hers untended." Spike's voice was a combination of furious and gloating as he tried to figure out how to deal with the news that Angel had given him.

Angel himself said nothing, simply let Spike's words wash over him. There was nothing to say. Spike was right. Let him yell.

"You're a blazing fool, is what you are," Spike finished, "and you're making my slayer pay the price for it. What the hell is wrong with you, that you could have her whenever you want and won't?"

Angel felt a flash of anger over the phrase 'my slayer' but fought it down. If he hadn't killed Spike yet this morning, he wasn't going to start now. "I..." Angel paused, tried to put into words what he had barely explained to himself. "Buffy loves Angel. The old Angel. Ensouled Angel. But after I lost the soul the last time, and Willow had to put it back again, it... well, it didn't take... quite right."

"So you're all Angelus-y again and you still haven't slept with the girl? That doesn't track. The Angelus I knew would have taken anything he wanted."

Angel snarled again, his face dropping its human mask to show the vampire underneath. " I am not him,"

Angel spat out, each word accentuated with with a crash as he hit the wall with his fist. The last blow was hard enough to crack the concrete wall of the crypt. As a way to convince Spike that this _wasn't_ Angelus, it didn't seem to be working.

"Sure you aren't," agreed Spike disbelievingly, careful to keep his distance. His eyes were scanning the room quickly, no doubt checking for weapons. Back in the day, Angel had trained him well.

With visible effort, Angel got himself under control again, spoke again. "I'm not _entirely _him. But he's in here with me, the demon and the man, all wrapped up together." Angel's voice was bitter, and why the hell not, Spike asked himself as he listened. "Willow's spell- it was better than the last, I won't lose my soul. But it also wasn't quite strong enough to erase the demon in me. And I don't want Buffy to know. Because then she won't love me anymore."

Spike grimaced, looked both sympathetic and pissed. "So you're making both of you into miserable sops? Christ, you're stupid. Stupid, stupid, bloody well stupid. She loves you, fool. More than she ever loved me and you're in here whining when you could be with her? She came to me, she came to _me_, because she couldn't have you. She wanted you, she wanted me to be you. Fuck, I'm lucky that she didn't scream your name."

"She..." Angel's voice stumbled over the words, "she screamed?"

"What, mate, she doesn't for you?" There was a sneer in his voice when he said the last. Angel reflected that it had always been this way between them, in the matter of women, Spike pushing his luck every time, just to prove that he was monster enough for the woman. Well, Angel ought to know that having a soul didn't change all that much about a vampire.

In response, Angel only glared. Trust Spike to throw that back in his face. "Why am I even here?" he asked aloud, disgusted by himself for coming to Spike of all people to try to figure out the hell he had made his life and Buffy's. "There's no reason for me to be here, nothing I have to say to you."

"Nothing?" Spike echoed, and the tone of his voice was strangely familiar.

He had sounded like that before, Angel remembered. When Spike was the newest of the family, so beautiful in his brash, foolhardy bravery. Drusilla had made the vamp for herself, but Angel had not been so blind that he could not see why she had turned the young poet. "Nothing," Angel repeated after a long moment of beating down memories of a younger and more willing Spike. He still wasn't blind and he had a good idea of what Buffy saw in Spike as well. "Except to tell you to stay the hell away from my woman."

Spike raised his eyebrows as he tilted his head to one side. "I did. Maybe you ought to be telling your woman to stay away from me. Cause, you see, I've always known the rules with Buffy and me. She calls the shots, not me. When she comes to call, I just come." His voice was wicked when he said the last, a deliberate taunt.

"Stay away from her, Spike," Angel said again, trying to find the energy to make his voice sound forceful and menacing. Spike's voice conjured images of the Buffy and Spike together, the two lean, hard blonds wrapped around each other in love and hate. How long, Angel wondered, had the currents for that been gathering. He remembered how the two of them had looked fighting each other, beautiful predators, killers in the night. Maybe it wasn't all that surprising that Buffy had turned to Spike when Angel left. Maybe the surprise was that she had waited for Angel to leave.

"Told you, man. If she comes to me, I'm not gonna be the one stupid enough to say no. You may be an idiot but I'm not."

"Fuck you," muttered Angel, and Spike just smirked, "Been there and done that today, mate, thanks."

So much for Angel's stated plan of not coming here to kill Spike. The rage bloomed in him then, it was one blow too many and Angel wanted Buffy, wanted Spike, could not believe that they had found in each other what he would not give either of them anymore, and with a snarl of anger, he was on Spike again and the younger vamp was pinned to the floor.


	15. Subsitute Love

Angel was punching Spike before he even knew what he was doing, his only clear goal to pound the smirk off of Spike's face, to take him down a notch or twelve, to make him weaker again, the lesser demon.

"Damn it," Spike managed to grunt out as he tried to wrestle Angel off of him, away. What made this worse was that he couldn't quite get a feel for Angel's motivation here. Sure, right now Angel was well on his way to beating the undead crap out Spike, but once upon a time, that had been foreplay for them. There was that kiss earlier, enough of a trip down memory lane that parts of Spike that he hated to remember wanted the older vamp again, wanted things to go back to the way they were, none of this stupid confusion of souls and humans. Back in the day, there had only been the blood, and the lust, and all the things that made them more monster than man. Simpler times those, glorious times.

With effort, Spike managed to land a few blows off his own, managed to fight off some of Angel's. Spike was strong, a master in his own right, but Angel had been his master, was older and stronger and way, way more angry than Spike was. There was also the small, niggling problem of the fact that Spike couldn't get the picture out of his head, of how incredibly pissed Buffy would be if he killed Angel.

She'll never do me again, crossed his mind and he blew the next punch, only landing a glancing blow on Angel's ear as opposed to the roundhouse to the jaw he had originally planned.

"Screwing up on purpose, Spike?" Angel breathed as he grabbed him by the throat and dragged him closer.

Spike tried to fight it as Angel pulled him closer, but he couldn't get away. Angel shouldn't have, couldn't have been this strong, this was Angelus's strength, a demon's strength. Good god, what had Willow wrought, when she cast that last spell on Angel? This was more than either Angelus or Angel had ever been, this was the two of them together, twice the demon, half the man. Spike tried to break the grip but he couldn't, he just couldn't. The fury, the rage, and the need. It wasn't just the strength of the vamp wearing him down, it was the emotion he could see in the other's face. This close to Angel, Spike could practically feel the fury and need radiating off of Angel.

Yeah, need. Spike could smell it on Angel. Nearly two years, Angel had been sleeping next to Buffy, wanting her, needing her, never touching her the way he wanted to, living a lie because he thought it would make her love him more, make her stay with him. And now here Angel was with Spike, and they were fighting, muscles hard against each other, and there was a history between them that even Spike couldn't deny. And for a minute, more than a minute, an eternity, Spike was tempted, past tempted. He growled as he felt Angel's fangs graze at him, part desire, part fear, part anger. He was not going to let this happen, he was not, because Angel had been his past, his long ago past, one he tried not to remember, and Buffy was his future. Buffy. He hung on the thought of her as she had been that afternoon, beautiful under him, her face so alive, glowing, flushed with life and love for him as she called his name, as she begged him for me. More beautiful than she had ever been to him before, because there was a joy in her face he had never seen before. When she had come to him today, there had been none of that blind panic, that unseeing lust that he was used to when she came to him. No, today she had been clean, had come in something almost like love.

So lost in his thoughts of Buffy, his memory of her, it took Spike a moment to notice that Angel had in fact not ripped his throat out and drunk him like a fountain. Angel was not biting him at all, Angel was kissing him, cold lips pressing against Spike's throat, his ear, his jaw, his mouth. _This_, Spike thought as he tasted his own blood in Angel's mouth, _is where celibacy gets you_. And then he couldn't think at all for a minute, as the need for sex and blood washed over him again, as the memories of his times with Angel writhed ruthlessly through his mind. _No,_ he tried to think to himself, _I don't want this. I want Buffy. _Tricky to believe that, when he could feel himself getting hard just from the kiss, when his hands were moving without his mind to pull Angel closer, closer. His body remembered Angel's touch, his domination, and it wanted it again, no matter what Spike might have to say about the issue.

"Sloppy seconds?" Spike managed to gasp out the taunt as Angel leaned in again for Spike's mouth and tangled his hands in Spike's hair. "Somehow this isn't how I thought it was supposed to go."

"You I can have," snarled Angel between devouring kisses. His voice reminded Spike of the way Buffy's used to sound, the way she had demanded what only Spike could give her. The familiar tone and Angel's desperate kisses stole all of his remaining thought, not to mention his speech, for a moment. He didn't even fight Angel, he just leaned into the kiss and gave back as good as he got.

But even as he lost himself in the taste of Angel, in his rough kiss, he was thinking no, reminding himself that he wanted Buffy, had had Buffy, there should be no room left in his mind to want Angel like this, no matter what his body said.

With a sudden burst of strength, Spike managed to push Angel off of him, sending the older vampire off balance and staggering across the room. "No, you can't! It's not my damn fault that you've been bloody well lying to the Slayer since you got back to town and now you're gagging for it!"

"He's been what?" Buffy's voice in the doorway, and both Angel and Spike turned to face her. _Oh, hell, _thought Spike, _what now?_


	16. Witness

Spike felt like he had been staked, when he saw the look on Buffy's face as she stood in the doorway. She may have come here strong and tough, ready for the fight, but what she had seen had taken all of that out of her. She was like a statue of herself now, her voice a caricature of horror and betrayal. Spike figured he knew that look, figured it to be the one that had been on his face ever time he had caught Dru with one of her demons. He had never meant to put that look on her face, had never wanted to see it there. She was meant for finer things and he began a litany of curses inside his head for causing her the one kind of pain she had never liked.  
_  
_Buffy turned her eyes to Angel first, and when she spoke, there was not even a shadow of her strength in her voice. "Lying?" she forced out.

Angel looked away, shamed, and stayed silent. Spike didn't blame him. What could the bloke say that wouldn't make things worse?

The worst of it, Spike thought as he watched them like a voyeur while she stared at Angel with all the pain in the world evident in her face, was that he, Spike, might as well not exist in this little scene. It was Angel's betrayal that hurt, Angel's lies, Angel kissing someone else. Buffy might have found Angel with anyone, might have found him with no one, and if she had heard the word _lie_ whispered by the rocks, her reaction would be the same. He stood by their show, the drama of their ever doomed romance, a story it would have pleased the bard himself to write, and waited for Buffy to condemn him for his faithlessness, waited for her to turn her scorn on him for finding him in her lover's arms. But she said nothing, did not even turn a spare insult his way, and the lack of it cut him more than any words or blows would have. They had always fought, as enemies, as allies, as lovers; the heart of all their relationships had always been the fight. Now, he was denied even that. He would not be able to stand it, if he was to come this far with her, only to lose her through goddamned Angel's stupidity. Without a fight, they had nothing.

Angel remained motionless in front of her, all silence and secrets. "You haven't answered me, Angel. What were you lying about, what could you tell Spike that you haven't been able to tell me?" Her voice caught a bit; Spike was sure that she hadn't wanted them to hear the sound, knew she would break something, probably their bones, if she thought they saw her as weak, and so he tried to ignore it and leave her pride intact at least. He had always loved her strength, could not bring himself to make her feel like less than she was. As badly as he wanted to comfort her, take some of this pain away from her, to acknowledge it was to weaken her and he could not do that. He hung his head in the shame of being such a witness to her pain and yet could not look away.

The sound, however, seemed to rip something free from Angel, some level of control that he had been able to hang on to until now. He made an inarticulate sound of pain, and took a half-step towards her, hand reaching for her, face drawn into mask of misery. Angel wasn't cut out for this kind of a soap opera, Spike figured. Not in this pure and soulful life he was trying to lead. Spike himself had been nothing but accustomed to the pain of loving Buffy, of seeing her hurt as a result of his actions. It had not what he had dreamed of, in his madness, not the love he thought they would share, but it had given him a strength it seemed Angel lacked.

Buffy said nothing, did nothing, simply stared at Angel's hand blankly until he dropped it. Her sheer passivity, so at odds with her normal behavior, seemed to force the words out of Angel. "I'm sorry, Buffy."

"For what?" she retorted, trying for cool and uncaring, but Spike could hear the pain, like a sliver of glass, ride through her voice.

Spike had known, when he first managed to get in the slayer's pants, that it would be an uphill battle to get her to forget Angel. Angel had been her first love. Had been, according to her, her only love, a story she had kept to even as she writhed beneath Spike, calling his name and never Angel's, begging for more and more and harder and harder. Never mind the way Angelus had tortured and killed her friends, never mind how he had tried to end the world, or the fact that, cursed as he was, he had no hope of making her feel the way that Spike did. It was Angel she loved, Angel she wanted, and Spike had been told, over and over, that he was just a poor substitute, a way to scratch an itch. She threw Angel in his face constantly, but he had tried to keep his temper about it. He had understood, he always had, how the first love felt, how it stayed with a person, be he monster or man, long past reason. Angel was to Buffy what Dru had been to Spike: perfection.

And now he wasn't.

"Angel, you fucking tell me what's going on here or swear to God, I won't be home when you get there and neither will Dawn." Her voice was steady now, but Spike could hear the pain under it and so could Angel.

Who knew if it was the threat of her going, or simply the pain in her voice, but Angel cracked. Shattered like an egg dropped from a high-rise. With a cry, he was across the room, on his knees before her, arms around her waist, with his head buried in the concave slope of her belly.

No, this hurt too much. Spike couldn't watch this, especially not if she went back to Angel. Shouldn't the fact that Spike was honest mean something? She loved him, Spike; she had told him. Why couldn't she just see his bastard of a sire was no good and leave him? How could Angel and Buffy both have turned away from him so easily, when so recently they had been wrapped around him, wanting him, needing him, his name in their mouth like fresh blood. Was there no place in this painful little dance for him? He couldn't stay here, couldn't watch any longer, he just couldn't. With a muffled curse, he shot back into the depths of crypt, hoping for some quiet in which to lick his wounds.

Buffy barely noticed when Spike left; he was barely a shadow to her in the face of Angel, who was still weeping blood red tears into her favorite shirt.

"What's going on, Angel?" she asked again, tired of the show. She was pleased to hear the anger in her voice. Anger she understood, she could handle. Yeah, she was angry. Much better than hurt and abandoned. If she wanted drama, she would have gone to the movies. This was getting old.

Angel dragged in a breath, using the familiar action to try and control his tears. They steadied him, all his little human acts did; they brought him back to what he wanted to be when he was around her. A liar. Pretending to be human, to be honest, to be all that she had ever wanted, all that destroyed in the instant she had heard Spike's words, so desperate, resonate with truth. Eyes filmy with blood, Angel looked up at her, took another breath. "I lied," he whispered.

"No shit?" she asked sarcastically. She was proud of herself, for being able to sound so uncaring. Inside, she felt annihilated, obliterated. She had made a life around this creature weeping into her belly. A dead, dusty shell of life, but a life still the same. "I pretty much knew that already. What did you lie about?"

"Everything."

She went cold. Nothing good could come from a statement like that. "You wanna clear that up for me some?"

"When I..." he hesitated, grimaced. "When I came back, I wasn't, I'm still not, will never be, what I told you I was."

"What did you tell me?" She was trying to remember back to Angel's return. The only thing she remembered clearly was that Angel told her he was a father, and somehow, looking at Conner, she doubted that was the everything he was talking about.

A longer pause; Angel couldn't bring himself to hold eye contact. Not a good sign.

"I let you... assume things. About me. Because it was easier." Another pause; it seemed to be getting harder for Angel to talk. After an interval so long she had started to wonder if he would ever talk again, he continued, slowly, brokenly. "The curse is gone. It's been gone since Willow returned my soul the last time."

She had not heard right. She could not have heard right. He had been back so long, had seemed so honest and faithful in his pained devotion to her, his celibate love, his apologies as she turned away from him, faking satisfaction. "Say that again."

He shuddered, hearing something in her voice that he didn't want to, maybe more even than she had wanted him to hear. "The curse is gone. But the demon, the demon is nearer than he's ever been. And he wants you too. Wants you in ways that scare me when they creep into my mind. God, the dreams... the way you bleed in them, under me, the way you let me drink-" he stopped himself, pulled himself under control with visible effort. "So I let you assume that the curse still held."

"So we could have..." she trailed off, stunned at the implications. A year and a half of her trying to do the right thing, of pretending that what they had was good enough, that there was nothing more she wanted or needed than this strange half love, a child's love, though she had been a woman for years. It was this kind of a life that he had left her because of, all those years ago. All of it for nothing, all of it a lie. "Did you just not want me?" she asked numbly. "Was it like you said after the first time, I just wasn't good enough?" The only man she had ever kept, had ever been the one to leave, she had kept through pain. She closed her eyes against the sting of Angel's words, the fear, sharp and bright, that it was Angelus who had been the honest one, when he told her she wasn't worth it.

"No!" Angel then, his voice interrupting her new obsession. "It was me. I didn't trust myself. I was afraid, if I got to close, if I let myself... I was scared I couldn't control it, couldn't control myself, my demon. I was scared I would hurt you."

"Spike hurt me all the time," she said in a dead voice, remembering so many times, the bites, the bruises. Remembering that morning. She had never been fragile, or breakable, or pure to Spike. She had never been on his pedestal. She had never been in doubt of his honesty with her. "I wanted him to hurt me. I liked how it made me feel."

Angel cringed, aghast and agape that she would say that and she took advantage of that moment of inattention to push him off of her. He went down in an ungainly sprawl at her touch, as if all his strength and control had left him. Good, at least she wasn't the only one. She looked down at him, so angry she could barely focus, and when she began yelling, it was such a relief to let the anger go, to let it soar out of her, a living thing, that she was almost afraid she wouldn't be able to stop. "Why the hell would you not tell me this? Why the hell would you lie to me so long? Do you think what we had was easy to find, that everyone had it, that you were so willing to waste it? What did you think our love was worth, that you figured it was better to lie than to risk telling the truth?"

"I was afraid I would lose you." Seeming to abase himself, he stayed on the ground before her, his face hidden by his hands so that his words were muffled by his shame. "Because I wasn't who I used to be. I wasn't the guy you fell in love with. I was scared you wouldn't love me anymore if you knew the things I was capable of."

Anger broke and crackled like lightening inside of her, electric bursts of rage followed by a slow rumble of thunderous despair. "Bullshit. I've always known what you were capable of. I've known since you killed Jenny. You were the one so obsessed with the fucking past. You were the one who wanted things to be just like they always were. You were the one who wanted to pretend like nothing had ever changed. And you were the one who could go and tell Spike first thing, tell him things it's clear that you never intended to tell me. Spike! I always thought you hated Spike! Or I thought that till last night. But it wasn't hate, was it? You loved the bastard, must have love him more than you love me."

"I love you more than anything!" Empty words. How could she trust him now?

"Just not enough to be honest with me." She wanted to throw things, she wanted to go out and kill something. To think that she had come here because she was worried the two of them would kill each other. Because she felt guilty as hell for cheating on Angel, felt scared for Spike. What a joke

Christ, this was a damned mess. Why couldn't she be like other girls? Why couldn't she have fallen in love with some nice, normal, human guy, spawned a couple of rug-rats? The principal at the high school had sure tried. But no, she fell in love with vampires. With dead guys who lied.

Spike was a jerk, but at least he had always been an honest jerk. Shit. She had always thought that Angel was honest. That the love they had was enough to get through everything. Now what was she supposed to do? She couldn't remember ever having felt like this before, couldn't remember anything that hurt quite this badly. In a daze, she turned away from Angel to try to find Spike in the crypt. He had been honest, hadn't he? And when Angel had kissed him, he had stopped it. Spike. But as she looked around, she saw he was gone, that she was alone except for the shattered bits of her life. Even Spike had left her now.


	17. Hide and Seek

Buffy left the crypt, walked away from Angel and right out into the sun, where vampires couldn't follow. She went home in a daze, feeling like a shell of herself, an empty picture frame. Dawn was in the kitchen, eating ice cream. She was seventeen, not concerned about her weight because she had a slayer's metabolism if not the strength and speed. Buffy walked past her silently, ignoring her hello, and went upstairs. Once there, she packed a bag, enough for two days, her stuff and Dawnie's. Hell, she even put in some of the stuff that she never let Dawn wear out of the house, just cause it was close to hand. Still feeling like night of the living dead, she grabbed the bag and did her zombie walk back to the kitchen. Once there, she took Dawn's hand and pulled her to the door.

"Buffy?" said Dawn, pulling back, but not too hard. "What's wrong? What are you doing?"

"You're driving us to the Holiday Inn," Buffy said, her voice sounding stiff from the work it took to keep the anger from showing. "We need some girl time. Alone."

"Buffy, where's Angel?" Dawn sounded afraid now, and it cut at Buffy, but she didn't stop hauling her little sister towards the car.

"He's with Spike. Who's probably comforting him as we speak. I interrupted a moment."

"I don't understand what you're talking about," Dawn protested.

"Thank god. You're too young to understand."

Dawn dug her heels into the ground. "Buffy, talk to me. I don't understand what's going on and you're scaring me. What do you mean about Spike? Is he back?"

"Yep, Spike's back, Angel is a liar, and you and I are getting the hell out of the house. Just come on, Dawnie. You know I can't drive myself."

Buffy could feel herself losing it, could feel her hold on her self-control slipping by the second. Not in public, there would be no meltdown in public. Bad enough she still had Angel's blood on her shirt. "Come on, Dawn," she snapped, wishing for once that she could be the little sister, that somebody could take care of her for once.

Dawn must have heard the emotion in her voice, because she took the bag from Buffy, raced back to the house for the car keys, and put Buffy and the bag in the car.

When they had been on the road for ten minutes, halfway to the Holiday Inn on the other side of town, she finally spoke. "You want to tell me what the hell is going on now?"

Buffy fought off her first response, to scream and frustration and kill something, maybe the car. That couldn't possibly be a good idea. "Angel's been lying to me," she said in what she hoped was a calm voice. "The curse is gone, it's been gone for years. He just never bothered to tell me."

Dawn processed that. Buffy had never been way up front about the curse, just gave Dawn the highlights. But she knew enough to know what that meant. "And Spike?" she asked after a moment.

"Spike. Yeah, Spike who promised to love me forever and keeps running the hell out on me. Yeah, found out that he was the one Angel told the truth to. Spike, the guy that Angel's forever snarking about, and here he is, in town less than three days, and Angel's pouring his damn soul out to him like they're the best of friends. And Angel wants him. Wants him maybe even more than he wants me, cause it was Spike he was trying to get busy with, and he could have had me years ago."

Through this whole rant, Dawn just stared at Buffy, wide-eyed; in a way, it was nice to know that there was something in this world that could render the girl speechless. After a long bout of silence, Dawn finally managed a quiet, "And which part of this sparked the insane jealousy?" and Buffy just shrieked inarticulately in response, pushed past any more sane response.

Buffy checked them into the hotel, and followed the clerk's directions to their room, up a floor and over the pool. As soon as the door closed behind them, Buffy picked up the first object she focused on, the plastic cups in their sani-wrap, and threw them as hard as she could across the room. The lack of any shattering sounds when they hit the wall dulled her pleasure in the act a bit, but a few years managing the family finances had finally taught her that really good temper tantrums were expensive.

"Feel better?" Dawn asked sardonically, and Buffy glared at her.

"You could try crying," she suggested, unfazed by the look on Buffy's face. "It is, you may have heard, the acceptable girlie thing to do. Might even make you feel better."

Buffy stalked to the T.V., grabbed the remote and threw herself on the bed, trying for nonchalance. The image of Spike and Angel was still burned into her brain, taunting her. "This place get porn?" she grumbled, hitting the power button, and Dawn hopped on the bed next to her sister, her muttered reply of, "It's gonna be a long weekend," lost in the growing volume of the T.V.; Buffy had found the adult section of Movies-on-Demand and did indeed seem to be trying to find the trashiest thing on it, anything to take the picture of Spike and Angel out of her mind. If she was going to be angry and frustrated, she wanted to have more control over it than this.

Angel was sitting in a sullen slouch against the wall of main section of the crypt when Spike finally returned, stinking drunk on his new best buddy Jack Daniel's. Figured the poofter would still be here. Wasn't enough the bastard had shown up and ruined all Spike's chances with Buffy. No, then he had to stay. And stay. And stay.

"Damn it, don't you have a home?" snarled Spike.

"Not so much anymore," Angel repiled dully. "I went to the house. She's gone. She's left me."

Now there was news to stop the presses. It was almost enough to sober Spike up. Well, no, it wasn't, but if he had been less drunk, it would have been enough. Angel looked like hell, pure hell, almost as bad as he had after that lovely little time Spike had him tortured. Spike thought about not laughing, but hell, whose fault was this if not Angel's? And he himself wouldn't be Spike if he wasn't laughing at Angel's pain. Angel looked hurt as Spike laughed, and it just made Spike chuckle the more. He was still fighting giggles as he slide down the wall in alcohol induced spinelessness to sit next to Angel.

"Hate to be the one to twist the knife, old mate, but that's what you get for lying to the girl. Now, me, I was never anything but honest with the slayer, and you see what that got me."

"A pity fuck?" suggested Angel bitingly, and Spike managed a halfhearted snarl at him before speaking.

"Even if it was, it's more than you've gotten from the girl in years. Don't know what you were on about when you were all Angelus and out to destroy the world- that girl has skills. I was all but panting, trying to keep up with her. Serves you right, her leaving you. Talent like that, it was a crying shame to keep her acting the nun so you could feel holier than thou."

"Do you have to keep bringing up your sex life with Buffy?" Angel's voice was tired, almost broken.

"Hey, you're the one who keeps coming back here." Silence then, as Angel didn't dispute it. "What do you want, then, Angel?" he asked.

Angel grabbed the bottle of JD from Spike's hand, the nice, beautiful bottle that Spike had only just started, and sucked down a long swallow. With drunken interest, Spike watched Angel's throat move as he did so. Angel might be the big the biggest sheep's prick to walk the Western hemisphere, but there was no denying he was a handsome sheep's prick.

"I need your help," said Angel after he finished his much-too-deep drink.

"With what?" asked Spike sullenly, grabbing the bottle back. His house, his rules, damn it; he was not in the mood to be sharing his booze with Angel.

"I need to prove to Buffy the curse is gone."

Spike stilled, lips wrapped around the mouth of the bottle. He would choke in surprise, but he didn't want to waste the whiskey. Carefully, he finished his drink before he spoke. "Seems to me you're in the wrong place for that. What were you thinking, a peep show for the girl, starring you and me? Didn't think a bounce in the bed with me was your definition of perfect happiness."

"Not like that!" Angel protested. "Well, maybe like that, because I'm out of practice, and I don't want to disappoint Buffy. No, I need your help getting her into bed in the first place."

"You need my help," Spike repeated. "Getting Buffy in bed. Why in the name of everything that's unholy would I want to do that?"

Angel leaned over, pried the bottle from Spike's hand, and placed it carefully on the floor. With calculated precision, he then leaned over and kissed Spike full on the mouth. Spike, drunk, horny, abandoned by the love of his unlife, kissed back, glad for anything familiar in his life, even if it was Angel taking what Spike didn't want him to have. When the kiss ended, Spike was sucking in unneeded air, reminded again of how Angel had kept him and Dru in thrall for so long. "You'll help," Angel said softly, "because there's something in it for you, as well."

It wasn't until the third night, after Buffy had extended their reservations, called herself and Dawn in sick to school, and spent a small fortune on adult films that had probably put Dawn off sex and the gynecologist forever, that Angel and Spike showed up. In a dark corner of her mind, Buffy had been wondering if they would both simply kill each other after she left. Or if they would just forget about her entirely, caught up in other interests. She hadn't wanted to care, but couldn't quite stop herself or even distract herself from the thought. Stupid hotel porno, geared for lonely traveling salesmen, with no consideration for the working girl. Why couldn't she set it up for the _Red Shoe Diaries_, that's what she wanted to know. She could do with a little David Duchovney angst to distract herself.

Dawn, taller, moved in front of Buffy to try to shield her from the two of them, but Buffy just put a hand on her shoulder and moved her away.

"Dawnie, why don't you go down to the arcade and play some games? You know where the money is."

Dawn looked at her with surprise; this was the most Buffy had spoken since coming to the hotel. Dawn, still with only the barest idea of what had cracked her sister's seemingly blissful life with Angel, directed a death glance at both the men. "You hurt her," she threatened, not sure which vamp she was talking to and frankly not caring, since they both seemed equally guilty, "and I'll find you both and burn you to ash. Dickweeds."

"Dawn," said Buffy warningly. "I'm the slayer. I'm the one who gets to kill them. You get a free hour virtually blowing stuff up in the activity center."

"Going," Dawn said reluctantly, grabbing the cash and flouncing to the door. "But I'm your sister and it's my job to make them feel like shit for hurting you."

"Out," and that word in Buffy's I mean it' voice, so Dawn went.

"C'mon in," Buffy said as Dawn disappeared from view, making a vague gesture in the direction of the interior of the room. "How'd you find us?"

"Remember how I'm a private detective?" Angel reminded her, stepping in to the room. Once in, he grabbed Buffy by the waist and pulled her over to the bed, sitting her down there.

"Presume much?" she bit out, seething at him as he sat down next to her. This was not the Angel she knew. This was like, playful Angel. Annoyed, she figured she could chalk this new behavior up to Spike's reemergence in his life. Even as she thought about it, Spike dropped down on the other side of her.

"We do presume," agreed Spike, "but we presume for a reason. See, we got to talking, Angel and I, during those three days when we couldn't find you, and we decided how we were going to do things."

Oh, yeah, there was the anger. She had been starting to worry that three days of bad food and worse movies had totally destroyed any hope she had of reacting normally to anything. "Oh, you decided? Great, that's just what I need. From what I last saw, it looked like you two decided you could do well enough without me." Her memory flashed back to Angel and Spike together in the crypt, kissing hungrily, all thoughts of her vanquished in their need for each other. If it hadn't hurt so much, it would have been hot, but as it was, she was feeling pretty angry and betrayed right now and the last thing she wanted to do was get turned on by either of these two guys. They were supposed to love her. Wasn't that what they kept telling her, all those times they hurt her for her own good?

"Actually, what we figured out is that we couldn't live without you," Angel said, draping an arm over her shoulder. Almost against her will, Buffy leaned into the familiar strength of him. Pissed. She was pissed at him, pissed and furious. Antagonized even. He, he was a liar, and, and he was in love with Spike. That alone should be enough to keep her in a towering fury for years to come. But he was so beautiful. Every time she saw him, every time after they had been apart, when she saw him again, it was like seeing him for the first time. She remembered how he looked, as he followed her into that alley. They had fought that first time, sure, but even as they traded blows, she had marveled at how handsome he was. She was still marveling. Closing her eyes, she leaned her forehead against his hard shoulder with a sigh. Mad, she was mad. The leaning thing, that was only cause she was tired. Stupid hotel beds.

"Neither of you count as alive," she retorted. "And where's broody, mopey Angel?"

"It's a figure of speech," Spike defended, sliding his arm around her waist. "And I ate broody Angel. The point is, we would do anything to win you back. Anything to keep you." He trailed a finger down her spine, slowly, moved closer to her.

For a minute, Buffy's mind caught and held on the image of Spike eating Angel. He didn't actually mean that, did he? What kind of eating was he talking about? So compelling was the image it actually took her a moment to register Spike's touch, but when it did, her eyes snapped open. "What are you doing?" she managed to ask. She could feel the fire come licking through her blood again at his touch, the same slow smolder she had always felt near him. She had never reacted to anyone like she had to Spike, had never felt this drawn to another creature, a moth to his flame. It was not exactly a feeling she was happy with, seeing as Angel sat right next to her.

She was sandwiched between the two vamps now, the kind of thing she might daydream about but had no idea how to respond to. Okay, check that, she had ideas, lots of them, but the courage to follow through... oh god, oh god, oh god... Spike's hair was a mess, tangled by old gel and what had to be Angel's fingers running through it. She remembering how much work it took to actually muss his hair, even now that it was longer, and could only imagine what Spike and Angel had gotten up to without her, to make him look this disheveled. Wow, was she ever over her head here. Angel. Spike. Bed. Dawn out of the room. "What are you two doing?" she repeated and even she could tell that her voice sounded weak.

"Seducing you," whispered Angel, leaning in to kiss her lightly as Spike held her, caressed her.

"Um, guys..." This was wrong, wasn't it? This wasn't the way her mother raised her act. But oh god, it felt so good. They were so beautiful, and she loved them both so much, a fact she couldn't ignore no matter how angry she was with them. Angel's kiss was like fire and ice, burning her and chilling her at the same time, Spike's touch like silk and velvet over claws against her skin. She was starting to forget why she was so mad. Their combined actions felt so good, she could barely move, felt paralyzed with pleasure. How many years of experience did these two have added together, three hundred and some? Oh god...

And yet, that word, seduced like she was just another of their prey, some stupid human too caught up in their beauty to look under the skin to the predators beneath. She could feel a hint of anger bubble up again, even through the mind numbing combination that was Angel and Spike focused on the same goal. "I'm not the kind of girl you can seduce-" she began, working to get the heat of rage back in her voice.

"We love you, Buffy," Spike said, interrupting both her words and her thoughts, brushing her hair off the back of her neck and dropping a kiss on the skin he revealed. She could feel his fangs scrape against her skin, a promise and a reminder. She had never had a lover like Spike and he knew it, was more than happy to help her reminisce over their shared past. Angel's kisses were lingering on her throat, tasting her skin slowly, as if he had all the time in the world to make her his. If it were either one of the men doing these things, she would be on him in a second, but with both she was terrified. The anger sank again, lost in a world of rising confusion and lust.

"And we know that you love us," Angel continued, kissing her jaw, her collarbone, back to her throat. She whimpered, tried to hide it, but she saw the sudden flash of Angel's smile and knew he heard her. Vampire. She was weakening by the second. She let her back curl into Spike's touch, almost moaned as he nipped at her neck, all sharp teeth and promise. She dropped her head back, felt it rest on Spike's shoulder. Angel chuckled at the newly exposed skin and trailed his tongue down her throat and between her breasts.

Spike's breath against her neck made her skin come all over goosebumps. "And after careful thought..." he began.

"...We decided to prove it to you," Angel finished for him, and he tilted her chin down so she could look him in the eyes.

"So don't think of it as seduction," Spike said between bites at her neck, "if you don't want to."

"Right," agreed Angel, lifting his eyes to her even as he worked at unbuttoning her shirt, "think of it as making us pay for hurting you."

"Yeah, love," added Spike, now adding his hands to the mix, and he had always had such talented hands, "just think of us as your willing slaves."

"I'm pissed at you both," she murmured, her last stab at a protest. Really, she was pissed. Not turned on at all. Okay, maybe a little turned on. Another kiss, another touch, sensation over sensation till she could almost not tell who was doing what. Okay, completely turned on and quickly forgetting whatever they had done to make her so mad in the first place. She had to admire the method to their madness- she would have no mind left to be mad with after enough of this. She couldn't believe what it felt like, to have all their attention focused on her this way, to have them so intent on her pleasure, her passion. The anger had fallen away, gotten lost in the fire building between the three of them. She could feel her breath quicken, feel herself respond to them, feel herself become lost in her response. A moan escaped her and the two vamps drank the sound up like the finest virgin blood. They had won and they knew it. No, no, she wasn't this kind of girl. Right? Not the kind that would let two men do, oh god, what were they doing now?

"Be pissed later," suggested Angel. His hands were moving lower, beginning to explore territory he already knew well. "Let us do this for you."

"Maybe by then you won't even _be_ pissed,} whispered Spike, suggestively. He was matching Angel move for move now and it was getting harder for her to think. Maybe she could be this kind of a girl if she tried. Another mirror caress from Spike and Angel and she started to think that she wouldn't even have to try, what with the vamps doing all the work. Spike's voice again, this time breathing in her ear, "What with being exhausted from the pleasure." She could feel him against her back, hard and solid, the way she always remembered him.

"This is not a good idea," she said, but her voice lacked any sincerity at all and she thought she might actually be melting. Her mind started to drift to whether or not either Spike or Angel had remembered to bolt the door when they came in. It would be bad if Dawn came in, very bad. Talk about getting an education. The movie porn had been one thing; this was surround-sound and 3D special effects. Buffy wasn't even sure that she was old enough to know what was going on here.

"I think you're wrong," Angel said and kissed her for real, no more playing. Oh hell, she thought, losing herself in the taste of him, the texture, the coolness. She could feel Spike pressed up against her back, his arms around her, hands touching her everywhere they could reach, teasing, taunting, driving her wild. God, she loved him. Them, she loved them. Why was she even pretending to fight this? People had fantasies about things like this. People wrote letters to _Penthouse_ about stuff like this, only they were making it up.

She fell into the kiss, gave it as good as she got, knew there was no turning back once she let them get this far. She would go insane with need if they didn't finish what they started.

"Angel, you can really, we can really..." she began, and then trailed off, not quite sure she could finish the sentence. She had never let herself belief they could make love, had never let herself believe they could have what came too easily to other lovers.

"We can really," he agreed, knowing instantly what she was talking about, and she could hear laughter hiding in the words, and maybe a trace of fear. Really, this must be scarier for him, his first test of whether or not the curse was truly broken. But he wanted her, she could tell he wanted her. His body was rock-hard from the effort of holding back, of not just taking what he wanted and damn the consequences. His eyes were yellow as he fought the monster inside of him, trying to stop it from taking her before he could.

"We're going to talk about the lying thing," she managed to gasp as Angel touched her particularly well, knowing that it would be the last thing she would be saying for awhile, at least if Angel and Spike kept up with their current actions.

"We'll talk later," Angel promised. "We want you now."

Spike repeated the sentiment, backed it up with another heart stopping kiss and she gave up even pretending to protest. She'd feel all kinky and wrong and perverted tomorrow. There would be plenty of time to feel like nasty slut girl tomorrow.

"Angel, bolt the door," she whispered and she felt Spike's laugh all the way through her as Angel leapt for the door. By the time he got back to the bed, Spike had already laid her body out and begun feasting on it. He had pushed her shirt up, tangled her hands in the sleeves, trapping her and for once she didn't care, because it felt so good not to be in charge, not be the one in control. If this was their plan to make things up to her, she was all for it. She couldn't remember the last time she had been seduced by anything. This was like some strange dream, like it wasn't even really her on the bed, writhing under Spike's touch, like it was a stranger's body and she was watching. Only it was about a thousand times better than anything she had found on the hotel channel. She was whimpering as she felt his mouth on her breasts, his hands gone lower; he was tasting her, touching her, devouring her, greedy in his need; a person would never know that he had been with her only a few days ago. It was like he had been starving for her, as if a thousand years would not be enough to slake his desire and she knew suddenly that it was the same for her, that if she had him every hour, it was still not be enough. It was that thought that did her in, that thought that dragged her under totally, and she gave herself up to Spike, to Angel when he came back, all her plans of protest gone like they had never been.

Angel stopped briefly on his way back to the bed and stared, apparently frozen by the sight of his childe and his lover, well started on passion, lost in each other. "Two hundred years," he breathed, "and I have never seen anything as beautiful as you two together." All his feral grace lost to need, he joined them on the bed and when he traded places with Spike, took over where the other left off, Buffy stopped even trying to pretend like she felt guilty for doing this. Why had she waited this long?

"C'mere, boys," she said, her voice throaty and deep, a stranger's voice to go with her stranger's actions, and she drew them both to her, taking back the control, taking back her rightful place with them, a queen to their princes. "C'mere..."

Afterwards, she lay exhausted and content in their cool arms, feeling almost dwarfed by their strength, their sheer presence. She had thought she heard Dawn knock at some point, couldn't even remember what she said in response, but could just remember hearing Dawn say she was going back to the house, would meet her later. Now it was just Buffy and the men.

"God, could it always be like that?" she asked softly. She had thought she would feel dirty afterwards, unclean, but all she felt was loved and beloved. And sated. God, did she felt sated. Replete, even. She had lost count of how many ways and times they had made love; they had only stopped when she couldn't take it anymore. Why had she been resisting? Buffy had never felt this wonderful. Never. She was limp with pleasure.

"Always," Angel promised, the love in his voice so pure and deep she felt like she could dive into it, like it was a sparkling pool of perfect turquoise water, a smooth, Caribbean sea of love, all of it for her. She was swimming in his love, bathing in it. She stretched a hand out, twined her fingers with his.

"As long as you want," Spike agreed and the love in his voice was no less, but it was fire, not water, flickering against her skin, warming her. They completed each other, her lovers did, light and dark, fire and water. How could she have even thought about choosing one over the other? It was only together that their true perfection showed.

"I thought I would feel... bad." Guilty. Dirty. Not washed clean, not purified by their love.

"Do you love us?" That was Spike, and she rolled to face him, in awe as always by his sheer beauty, the lines of his jaw, the blaze in his eyes. Her love for him was always a shock to her. Half the time, she couldn't understand how she had come to love Spike, when they had started off so firmly on opposite sides. There was no moment she could point to where she could say, here, this was the time, this was when I fell in love with him. All she knew was that by the time he had left that second time, she could no longer stand being away from him. She could tell herself that her visit to the crypt had been good-bye, but she knew it to be a lie. If Spike was near, she would be with him. He filled something in her, a spot she didn't know was there until he had left it empty. She smiled at him, tried to let all the love and joy she felt in his presence pour through her eyes. She was alive with him, alive, awake, and aware in a way she could never be without him.

"Duh. You think I do that with just every pair of incredibly hot guys who show up in my hotel room?"

"God, hope not," said Angel behind her and she shoved a gentle elbow into his sternum. He laughed and closed teeth gently on her neck. She couldn't believe how good it had felt with him. She had been a child the one and only time they had made love in the past. She was a woman now, and things were different. She knew things, and could appreciate what Angel knew in a way she couldn't before. And with Spike... whoa! He had been amazing enough all on his lonesome. Tag-teamed with Angel and, god... they must have broken at least a dozen state laws. Heck, they must have broken the laws of physics; she hadn't known three people could do the things they did.

"See, that's why you don't feel all hinky," Spike went on. "Love, real love, whatever you do feels right. It's when you don't love someone and you do it anyway that it feels wrong. With us, you can try whatever nasty little idea that takes your mind and you won't ever feel dirty, because it's love." He sounded pretty pleased with himself. She couldn't say that she blamed him. She was pretty pleased with him as well. And Angel.

"Why'd he lie?" she asked Spike, rolling her eyes back towards Angel, who was still kissing her neck.

"'Cause he's a nambypants Nancy-boy," Spike said, "and was all afraid you wouldn't love 'im if he wasn't broody and cryptic. Git."

"Idiot," she agreed.

"I resent this," said Angel mildly, taking a break from his concentration on her neck. Spike and Buffy both ignored him.

"Completely," Spike agreed seriously. "You gonna forgive the man? He's been hell to live with these three days."

"Stressed," agreed Angel, still in that mild tone, still with the kissing.

She rolled over again and when Angel moved to kiss her lips again, she stopped him, made him meet her eyes. "Angel, is he right? Did you lie because you were scared?"

A long moment of Angel looking ashamed with himself. "Yeah. I wanted to tell you the truth so many times, and I always took the coward's way out. Things were going so well, I didn't want to mess them up. I'm sorry."

"Forgive him," came Spike's singsong tone behind her. "Forgive him."

Angel made big eyes at her. He looked sincere. He sounded sincere. His eyes were beautiful, deep pools of shadow. She loved him. She had loved him since she was fifteen. He was her partner, the other half of her heart and soul, her husband in every way but the legal. She could not recall a time when he was not there to catch her when she fell. Their lives were so twined together by now that there was no telling where the one began and the other ended. The lie was bad, but she had kept things back as well. He loved Spike. Okay, that would take awhile to get used to, but she figured he was in the same boat, thinking about her and Spike. At least he and Spike had come up with this plan, the plan where they wore down all her objections through incredibly good sex. She wanted to be pissed. She ought to be pissed. Ah, screw it. She loved him too much to be mad at him. "I forgive you," she whispered and Angel kissed her, hard and deep as Spike made some kind of a happy, whooping sound behind her.

When Buffy finally broke free from Angel's kiss to watch him kiss Spike (and there was a sight she was never going to get bored with) she said in a thoughtful tone of voice, "We're going to need a bigger bed."


	18. Epilogue

Epilogue

"So, who do you live with?" asked Sheryl, the new girl, as she sat with Dawn and her friends at lunch. "I moved here to Sunnyhell with my mom after the divorce."

It was all Dawn could do not to choke on her milk as Sheryl turned bright, inquisitive eyes on her. She thought of the big, king-size bed in Buffy's room, where even at noon, two drop-dead beautiful vampires slept the exhausted sleep of the wicked and wanton. They had bought the bed the same day a dazed and happy Buffy had finally brought them home after an extra two days at the hotel. Spike had been fully moved out of the crypt and into the house in record time and every second since then had been nothing but a learning experience for Dawn, even though all three of the adults tried hard to act respectable and responsible around the children. Wasn't working, but they tried. On the plus side, both she and Connor were spending a lot of time wherever Spike, Buffy, and Angel weren't, and that was resulting in a lot more of his attention focused on her. She grinned smugly to herself. Only two more months until her 18th birthday, otherwise known as the day she could stop pretending Connor was her brother.

"Um, my sister, her boyfriend, and his family," she managed to say, her mind caught on the word family in conjunction with the time she had caught Angel and Spike kissing in the kitchen, apparently making up after an argument over what was the perfect meal to make for a hungry slayer when she returned from a late class. Ignoring the ick factor of my sister's boyfriends, it had been about the hottest thing Dawn had ever seen. Family. Yeah, and she was going to be crowned Miss Normalcy of the 21st Century.

Then she thought of the new and beautifully detailed silver rings Buffy, Spike, and Angel wore now. Designed by Angel, wrought in metal by some fire-breathing demon friend of Spike's, the rings were the closest things the three of them would see to wedding bands, even if two of them weren't undead. Dawn had loved watching the look of pure happiness on Buffy's face as the vamps took turns for the honor of putting the ring on her finger. They had both knelt at her feet, handsome and adoring, and she thought she had seen Spike's hand tremble as Buffy slipped the matching ring on his finger. Angel had met Buffy's eyes with confidence as she put his on, and Dawn remembered another ring, an older one, and knew that Angel had considered Buffy his wife long before Buffy had even thought the word. So what if the neighbors looked at them funny? This was the happiest Dawn had ever seen her sister.

"That's who I live with. Buffy, Angel, Spike, and Conner. That's my family."

The End


End file.
